The Mixed Media Company from Berlin, headed by Frank Burckner, based their piece on the work of Robert Jungk, the Austrian futurologist. The central intent of the piece was to create a debate in the mind of the spectator as to whether the world will end in disaster by the year 2000, or whether there will be international peace.

Burckner's group, numbering about 20, was especially formed for the Spielstrasse program and consisted of actors, students, workers, dancers, musicians, and puppet players. He started his piece (1976) on a platform near the Multivision Center, where the performers began to assemble the parts of what would later be a large, three-headed monster puppet. This figure symbolized capitalism, militarism and politics. The performers—some wearing elongated gold masks, military uniforms, and helmets, and others in various circus, athletic and other costumes—carried on a dialogue with the spectators, warning that the working man had to struggle to prevent his brain from being turned into a computer by the forces represented by the three-headed puppet.

Any report on Olympic Theatre would be incomplete without mention of the tremendous amount of theatre activity generated throughout West Germany by the occasion of the Games. For the most part, this activity—some of it officially connected with the athletic events through a huge program called “Olympic Summer”—involved conventional theatre fare, ranging from productions of Brecht's Mother Courage, Büchner's Danton's Death, Wedekind's The Love Potion, Hochhuth's The Midwife, to Walcott's The Dream on Monkey Mountain (performed by the Negro Ensemble Company), the Chinese shadow play San mei hua pan ying, Genet's The Balcony, and Brook's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Although every major German city had a full Summer production schedule, most of the abovementioned plays were staged in or near Munich, Berlin, Augsburg, and Kiel.

The purpose of this piece, however, is not to survey all the theatre activity that took place in West Germany this past Summer, but to report in brief note form on some of the more interesting information I gathered on productions, playwrights and directors during the “Olympic Summer.”

The work of Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes is not very well known in the United States. Although he appears to be a playwright of some importance, none of his plays has, until now, been translated into English. Of course there are reasons for this neglect, one of which may be that he has been involved in other arts, primarily painting, and has not concentrated his energies exclusively in the theatre. During his lifetime, Ribemont-Dessaignes, who is now 87 years old, has been a painter, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, composer, radio personality, actor and “dancer,” as well as playwright. In addition, he has written a children's book and translated into French works by Nietzsche and Michelangelo.

The son of an obstetrician, Ribemont-Dessaignes was born on June 19, 1884, at Montpellier in the south of France. When he was young he secretly composed symphonies, operas and quartets and wrote a drama.

Tramp, one of the recent productions of the Théâtre Laboratoire Vicinal of Brussels, clearly exemplifies the main concern of the group: a tendency toward abstraction embodied in a nonexplicit use of language/sound and an emphasis on objects and the physicality of the actor. Although related to the work of Grotowski in the austere “poverty” of its means and its attempt to exploit as fully as possible the physical presence of the performer, Tramp is quite different in its approach to literary content. While story and character have provided a core or focus for Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre presentations, the Vicinal has abandoned these elements almost totally. According to Frédéric Flamand, the director of Tramp and an actor in it, “the strength and magic of the play come from the concentration into a unified energy of almost-abstract scenic moments ….”

Mouchoir de Nuages (Handkerchief of Clouds) by Tristan Tzara, the leader of the Dada movement, was staged in 1924 as Dada was dying. Perhaps, as Michel Sanouillet suggests, the movement was already dead, but the first manifesto of Surrealism, the movement that replaced Dada, was not to be published until the Autumn of 1924. Handkerchief of Clouds was first performed on May 17, 1924, at the Theatre de la Cigale as part of the “Soirées de Paris,” sponsored by Count Etienne de Beaumont.