Notes from the post-show Q&A — Jens Harzer and Oliver Reese
Berliner Ensemble's De Profundis at The Coronet Theatre, London, October 2026. Edited notes from the audience discussion. Spoilers.
The production and its theatrical approach
The Berliner Ensemble and its heritage. Oliver Reese briefly explained the company's history, from Brecht's The Threepenny Opera premiering at the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm in 1928 to Brecht's establishment of the Berliner Ensemble after his return from exile. The company moved into the Schiffbauerdamm theatre in 1954, and Helene Weigel continued leading it after Brecht's death in 1956. Reese considers performing Brecht's works part of the theatre's continuing responsibility, although he said that Brecht was not a particular artistic influence on this production of De Profundis.
The scale and ambition of the production. The Coronet performance was approximately the 32nd since the production opened around a year earlier. In Berlin it plays in the Berliner Ensemble's main auditorium, seating around 700; it had also appeared at the Salzburg Festival. The production lasts approximately 110 minutes and is organised into seven chapters. Reese and Harzer deliberately resisted reducing the demanding text to a more conventionally comfortable running time. Reese described the evening as an experience that could bring both actor and audience close to mental exhaustion.
A deliberate refusal to impersonate Oscar Wilde. Harzer's starting principle was that he would not portray a recognisable historical image of Wilde. He wanted to remove familiar associations: Wilde as dandy, celebrated literary personality, author of Dorian Gray, or simply a figure defined by his sexuality. Reese recalled Harzer insisting at the first rehearsal that he would definitely not play Oscar Wilde. They were not making a biopic. Instead, Harzer wanted to approach the experience and emotional substance of the letter as personally as possible, allowing the words to generate a stage presence rather than reconstructing Wilde's appearance or mannerisms.
Language, acting and the rehearsal process
Language as the foundation of the performance. Both artists repeatedly stressed the extraordinary literary quality of De Profundis. Their adaptation used a recent German translation by the poet Mirko Bonné, which Reese thought much more successful in conveying Wilde's artistic language than earlier translations. He wanted Harzer to be able to speak, perform and almost sing the text, giving its literary qualities a physical presence. Their admiration for the writing drove the process. Reese recalled that Harzer repeatedly arrived at rehearsals having returned to the book and discovered additional sentences he wanted to include.
The act of beginning to speak. Harzer described the opening as a particularly important challenge. The letter begins with a man who has been isolated for a long time and must somehow begin to find words for his circumstances. Harzer saw his own theatrical situation as analogous: an actor alone in an enclosed space, attempting to open his mouth and begin speaking. Rather than demonstrate imprisonment or suffering through recognisable acting conventions, he wanted each performance to begin with a genuine attempt to find a personal relationship with the words. This helps explain the observed stillness, restraint and physical rootedness of the acting.
The box as both restriction and freedom. The performance takes place within a square playing area approximately 1.3 metres by 1.3 metres. Reese argued that what initially appears to imprison the actor actually creates extraordinary freedom. Within the space Harzer can lie down, climb, lean against the walls, paint, manipulate objects and discover new possibilities of movement. Concealed openings allow objects to appear almost magically. Reese described the set as an empty book or page on which the performance begins to write itself. He stressed that he had never thought of it simply as a realistic prison cell; one image he associated with it was the last human being in space.
Stillness, light, music and the physical score. The staging gradually emerged through experiment rather than from a completely predetermined visual concept. Harzer developed actions involving a bird, painting and physical interaction with the set. Reese worked with a composer who participated in rehearsals and developed music in response to what was happening. Reese wanted music with depth, spirituality and an almost eternal quality; he mentioned the organ music of Interstellar as a reference. Lighting, colours, music, silence and physical movement became ways of giving shape to the language and distinguishing the seven chapters.
The form emerged from the actor and the text. Reese described a highly collaborative process in which Harzer's energy, choices and developing performance helped determine where the production needed transitions, cuts, changes of light or shifts in musical texture. The microphone sequence was another discovery made during rehearsals. Reese said that the form was generated out of the text rather than imposed upon it. He also recalled the difficulty of returning after a summer break with only four days to prepare, requiring Harzer to re-enter an exceptionally demanding performance with considerable intensity.
The special relationship between director, actor and audience in a monologue. Reese has previously adapted works including Lolita, Günter Grass's The Tin Drum and Roddy Doyle's The Woman Who Walked Into Doors. He explained that monologues create an unusually close director–actor relationship. An actor needs a partner: during rehearsal that partner is the director, while during performance it becomes the audience. However, De Profundis posed a particular problem because it has no straightforward narrative progression. Unlike The Tin Drum, which follows a recognisable life story, Wilde's letter inhabits one prolonged moment of isolation in which memory, accusation, grief and thought unfold.
Wilde's imprisonment, art and the impossibility of return
The tension between universal experience and historical specificity. An audience member challenged Harzer's suggestion that the emotional experience of the letter could equally have arisen from a heterosexual relationship. She argued that Wilde's homosexuality and its criminalisation were indispensable to understanding why the letter existed at all. Reese agreed with the historical importance of Wilde's persecution. He described Wilde's prosecution as an attack not only on an exposed public figure but on queer society more broadly. The exchange exposed a genuine tension in the production's approach: seeking a universal human predicament without erasing the particular injustice that produced it.
Wilde's imprisonment as the destruction of an artist. Reese stressed the severity of Wilde's punishment: isolation, compulsory labour, and restrictions on books and writing during much of his imprisonment. He saw this as an attack on Wilde's identity and ability to create art. Wilde emerged physically, socially and psychologically damaged, unable to resume his previous life in England, and died only a few years later. Reese found it especially moving that De Profundis, written as a personal letter, became a major literary work in its own right. The production's song and microphone sequence partly embodied the struggle to create something artistically meaningful from suffering.
The imagined future at the end of the letter. Reese described the final emergence from the box as expressing something utopian. Wilde imagines a possible life beyond imprisonment, perhaps somewhere like Bruges, and another chance of being together with Bosie. But Reese emphasised that this imagined renewal never materialised. Wilde's health, finances, reputation and artistic life had been devastated. The possibility of a new beginning exists within the text and performance, but the historical biography refuses an easy resolution.
Transformation, audience and the meaning of theatre
Harzer's principle that beginning and end must be different. Asked what effect or catharsis he wanted to create, Harzer described a principle important to him as an actor: the beginning and end must be different. He appears to have referenced the poet Friedrich Hölderlin. Harzer related this to the final chapter, in which the performer wets or changes his hair, changes his clothes, adopts a more contemporary appearance and eventually emerges from the box. He described the character as becoming almost childlike, freer and in some respects a different person. The change is more than a change of costume: something has happened during the performance.
The ending as an invitation to respond. Harzer emphasised the final movement towards an imagined other person. After spending nearly two hours speaking Wilde's letter, the performer reaches towards the possibility of an answer: the other person has the freedom to respond imaginatively, just as Wilde has attempted to express himself. Yet Harzer also acknowledged the painful contradiction. This apparent opening or gift does not erase the historical destruction of Wilde's body, life and identity. The ending contains both a possibility of freedom and the knowledge that restoration was impossible.
The paradox of isolation and audience proximity. Harzer contrasted performing the production in Berlin's large auditorium with the intimacy of The Coronet. He found the smaller space somewhat easier because the physical distances were reduced. Yet he also explained that the box creates a kind of shell, giving him independence from the audience even while he feels their presence. The performer is simultaneously intensely exposed and profoundly alone. Reese particularly appreciated the purity of the production: essentially an actor, language, light and sound.
Rejecting a predetermined emotional impact. When an audience member asked what catharsis he hoped to produce, Harzer resisted offering a clear answer. He observed, with some scepticism, that many theatre artists are very good at explaining their intended effects and presenting those explanations to audiences. That was not his approach. His priority was not to communicate a predetermined message but to undergo something through the performance. The transformation between beginning and end mattered more than specifying what the audience should feel.
“Storytelling of the soul.” Harzer concluded by distinguishing the performance from an actor simply standing onstage and telling a story or recounting a novel. Such work might be enjoyable, but it was less interesting to him. Here, the task was to begin in an uncertain state, find the words and pass through the different psychological and emotional worlds of the letter. He described this as “storytelling of the soul”. Reese immediately embraced the phrase as an appropriate conclusion to the discussion.
The identification of the underlying passage in Remarks on Oedipus comes from subsequent research, not an explicit discussion of that essay during the Q&A.