Tolstoy on stage

Volker Schloendorff rose to fame with his 1979 film production of Guenter Grass' book "The Tin Drum," for which he won a Palme d'Or at that year's Cannes Festival. His most recent theater project - "The Light That Shines in the Darkness" by Leo Tolstoy - will be performed outdoors in Neuhardenberg, Germany, on Aug. 20 and 23. In September, the production will be shown with Russian subtitles in Tolstoy's birthplace, Yasnaya Polyana.

Deutsche Welle: The play is about how to lead a good life: sharing everything one has, which Tolstoy actually managed to do, or only thinking about oneself. It's quite a contemporary topic, too, considering the current finance crisis and discussions over exorbitant manager salaries.

Volker Schloendorff: I've known Tolstoy as a novelist and like to read his books. Especially when you get older, you read works like "War and Peace" or "Anna Karenina" with greater interest. The books don't just portray a hero or heroine that he identifies with, but an entire panorama of people and fates. They are all right in their own way, which requires great breadth.

Theater is exactly the opposite. It has to be reduced, and everything has to lead up to just a few characters and one explosive conflict. But this play doesn't do any of that. It's more of a panorama with a lot of fragments and settings that we evoke from the text. The stage design is nature itself and the person in it who struggles to find out how to live properly. I don't think it can be measured by the current situation.

With such breadth, what is the focus of your Tolstoy production?

I have often in my life been seduced by ideas, and I've probably led others to believe these ideas as well. Therefore, I'm interested in the question of to what extent one is responsible for the misfortune one causes and to what extent it is avoidable.

Tolstoy, like the main character in the play, wants to give everything away. He wants to live according to Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, share everything with everyone, and give land to the farmers. But he completely destroys his family in doing this. The young people who take him seriously land in the correctional military battalion or in a psychiatric clinic or in Siberia. And he still believes his ideas are true.

That's the focus. I don't have an answer. I just present his drama.

Were you inspired by the performance locations in Germany's Neuhardenberg and in Russia's Yasnaya Polyana?

The open-air theater is an inspiration. I wouldn't have dared to do anything in Berlin's Deutsches Theater. That's not my profession. Outdoors, performing in nature is automatically a little bit like film. And if it rains or is hot or the sun shines, then that's part of the show.

It also has something playful - after all, it's a summer treat, even if it's a rather serious one. I think it will also be like that in Russia.

The German-Russian relationship hasn't always been a summer treat. Does that play a role in your approach to the production?

That's the most important part, of course. I think it wouldn't have been so exciting for all of us it we were to only perform in Neuhardenberg. That fact that we're forced here to enter into a certain kind of Russian mysticism helps us better understand the other side.

Essentially, we don't know anything about Russia at all - especially those of us in the West. I don't know how it is in the eastern part of Germany. But if anyone knows anything about Russia, then it's about the Russian Revolution and what came out of it. We don't know much about Russian culture before that - even those who have read Dostoyevsky's "The Gambler."

There's the question of whether Russia is part of Europe or whether is has its own culture. And if it does, what kind? Is it Asian, or more of a spiritual culture, or is it a much more materialistic one? That's one approach in dealing with a work like this.

The play has never been performed in Russia. What have you gained so far in dealing with the work?

When you read 19th century Russian literature, you start feeling very superficial. You have the feeling that we, the Germans, are not the poets and the thinkers - what we write just scratches the surface. The Russians go straight to existential matters.

The character in the play says, 'I've recognized what's right, so I'll give away all I have without thinking about my family and go into the desert.' That way of thinking is totally foreign to us - both in our lives and in our literature.

It's an absolutist way of looking at life. But there are so many Russian cliches - endurance, soul, cordiality - we have to be careful.

We constantly have to see when we're playing a Russian and when we're playing a cliche and we don't even know what it is. In the end, we can only play ourselves - Germans. And we try to do that in this piece too. We don't try to chum up to the Russians, but we say, this is how we understand it, and this is how we portray it - which makes us quite vulnerable.

Interview: Werner Herzog (kjb)

Editor: Sean Sinico