In Praise of Realism is an intriguing, albeit challenging, work. With it, the German dramaturge Bernd Stegemann has provided a sequel to his 2013 Critique of Theatre, in which he explored the complicity of postdramatic and postmodern aesthetics with neoliberalism. According to Stegemann, however, the ‘shock strategies’ of financial capitalism, climate change and natural catastrophes have put the postmodern ‘dogma of contingency’ and the ironic self-referentiality of postdramatic performance into question. Stegemann consequently witnesses a ‘newly awakened interest in reality’ (p. 7) in contemporary theatre practice. Nonetheless, after ‘more than one hundred years of the avant-garde, fifty years of postmodernism, deconstructionism, and representational critique, few concepts are as firmly locked in the aesthetic poison cabinet as realism’ (p. 12). Liberating realism from its ‘postmodern imprisonment’ (p. 11) thus presents an arduous but worthy task.
Stegemann takes ‘realism’ to be ‘the aesthetic method through which we can cope with an increasingly contradictory world’ (p. 11). This builds on two assumptions arguably shared by all artistic realisms. First, ‘there is a reality and we can try to understand it’, and second, there exist forms of realistic portrayal which help ‘grasp the world as variable and modifiable’, thus freeing people from ‘painfully tolerating their lives as an incomprehensible string of chanceful events’ (p. 8). ‘The Debate about Realism’ (chapter 1) has clear dramatic and philosophical antecedents, most notably Maxim Gorki, Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht and Slavoj Žižek. Amidst the propagation of socialist realism in the 1930s, for example, Brecht proposed realism ‘not as a question of style, but as one exclusively of method’ (p. 44). Stegemann highlights that for Brecht ‘all means can be used formally or realistically, depending on whether they make reality recognizable or not’ (p. 47). Nineteenth-century bourgeois realism, and its affirmation of individualist self-expression, is therefore as problematic as its twentieth-century avant-garde alternatives, such as naturalism or documentary theatre. Their celebrations of authenticity have long been coopted under the ‘cynical pragmatism’ of post-Fordism (p. 201).
By recourse to five contemporary theatre productions, Stegemann investigates examples of this new realism. In addition to analysing works by Hacks, Röggla and Jelinek, he lauds Thomas Ostermeier's Ibsen interpretation Ein Volksfeind, while criticizing Kill your Darlings! Streets of Philadelphia by René Pollesch for being yet another ‘complicated affirmation of complex circumstances’ (p. 198). In order to find a way out of the neoliberal ‘misery’ and its postmodern ‘mist of relativism’, theatre needs to embrace a realism that recognizes the contradictions of today's world (pp. 201–2). According to Stegemann, such a new realism in theatre first has to recognize that our society is characterized by hierarchically organized contradictions before it can mobilize its unique ability ‘to play with its present age in order to act out speculative other realities’ (p. 203).
Even if one agreed with Stegemann that new practices of realism offer a path of resistance to an arguably complicated postmodern and neoliberal condition, In Praise of Realism leaves little space to imagine viable alternatives to rejecting postdramatic theatre and adopting a dialectical realism. This slightly undermines the compatibility of his agenda with debates on artistic research, realism and neoliberalism in adjacent fields, such as those on relational aesthetics of post-autonomous art in the anthropology of contemporary art. Nonetheless, Stegemann's new intervention in contemporary theatre practice and theory presents a coherent and confident account, which will be of interest to an interdisciplinary readership concerned with how theatre and the arts can imagine alternative realities today.
