A Puzzling Statement: The Chorus and the German Improvised Comedy (Stegreifspiel)

The starting point for my deliberations in this article is a statement made by Einar Schleef which, at first glance, is puzzling and certainly gives us a lot to think about. In an unpublished interview he gave during the rehearsals for a staging of Bertolt Brecht's Mr. Puntila and His Man Matti, the theater practitioner and theater theoretician made the following remark:

Even if you take this statement to be a mere witty remark, it is still remarkable that Schleef equates his great achievement—bringing the chorus back to the stage of the contemporary theater—with, as he says, this “second interest,” the improvised comedy (Stegreifspiel), which he sees as the German version of the commedia dell’arte. This raises many questions: Do leading the chorus back to the stage and the revival of the improvised comedy have something in common? And, if so, to which extent is the thing that they have in common connected with the major project undertaken by Schleef and other theater practitioners after (or nach) Brecht, that is, the dismantling or deconstruction of the theater model that still dominates all German municipal and state theaters today—in spite of a myriad of avantgardist efforts?

I would like to examine these questions by starting with a hypothesis that I have derived from a statement made by Jean Paul, in which the chorus and the improvised comedy converge once more. In his Introduction to Aesthetics, he describes the Harlequin or, rather, his German pendant, Hanswurst, as “Chor der Komödie” (“the chorus of comedy”). As I would like to show—if we think about it in connection with recent theoretical and practical theatrical works that deal with the chorus and the improvised comedy—this rather intuitive interpretation allows us to reevaluate the remarkable separation that begins to take place in the mid-eighteenth century with the formation of a bourgeois, that is, the modern theater.