The Staatsoper Unter den Linden has risen from the rubble many times since its completion in 1742. A phoenix from the ashes, it was Prussia’s first freestanding opera house, and the first to stand apart from a royal palace. Commissioned by Frederick the Great and designed by architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff as part of the monumental Forum Fridericianum, a planned center for Berlin’s intellectual and artistic life, the Staatsoper was conceived as a new cultural landmark for the city. Over the centuries, it became a defining stage for the composers, conductors, singers, and musicians who shaped the canon of European classical music, from Carl Heinrich Graun and Giacomo Meyerbeer to Richard Strauss, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Herbert von Karajan. Its history is inseparable from the history of German music itself, marked by premieres, artistic revolutions, political upheaval, destruction, and reconstruction. Reassembled like a Frankenstein body, it became a theatre for the people.

For Lilith Stangenberg, the theatre became a place of discovery at sixteen. For just two euros and fifty cents a ticket, she could visit the Volksbühne Berlin Ensemble after school and immerse herself for hours in the dramatic worlds of Frank Castorf and many other important directors of the time. Self-taught from this place of devotion, she has established herself as one of the most recognizable actors in German cinema. During an hour-long Google Meet video call between Berlin and Paris, Lilith recalls the intensity of a moment when cloaked beneath one hundred pairs of eyes, the halting experience of shooting on 35mm as if the film were running away like a river, and the enduring and necessary role of an actor to hold catharsis for others. In an age when reality seems stranger and more unreal than fiction, and images are frequently edited or replicated, it’s worth considering the stage as a place for honesty, combat, and freedom. It holds an increasingly vital place in a world of self-censorship and short-attention economy. In praise of the Beckett error, and the perfect possibility of human creation that holds the instant which is, in the words of Clarice Lispector, living seed. 

So much of how identity forms does so through the task of finding, through error or effort, works and stories that entrance us in a stupor, embedding themselves under our skin, forming our personalities. For teenagers, that very porous mode of being can make for a great education. “I became an actress through being a spectator. You could get very cheap tickets for the production. I was infatuated.” Every day after school, Lilith would venture to the Volksbühne, built in 1914 on what’s now Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, its facade carved with the slogan “Die Kunst dem Volke” (Art to the People), often watching the same play several times. It was here that she was introduced to the work of Frank Castorf, who was directing works by Dostoyevsky. Reading the books alongside, Lilith gave herself a rich education in the theatre and a complete immersion in all angles.

She describes that sensation as a bridge. They say never to meet your heroes, but it was from the seats of this theatre that Lilith began to know the comrades who would soon become her peers, steering her away from a traditional education and into one that felt more like a place of combat. “Some of my more experienced colleagues recommended instead to jump into the water and try. I worked with some people who grew up in the GDR, and they had this awareness of what it meant to have freedom of opinion and freedom of speech because they had to fight for it.” Castorf directed the Volksbühne during a tumultuous time when Berlin was attempting to unify itself; the theatre was a stronghold of East Berlin identity and anti-capitalist, anti-establishment theatre, deliberately resisting the Westernization and gentrification sweeping the former East. The productions were long, chaotic, and politically charged. “I was very influenced by that sort of spirit, and the belief that art is a critical force.” Through these role models, she understood that, beyond being a place to create, theatre also carried a seriousness, “a responsibility behind that freedom.”

For many centuries, theatre has stood as a stronghold for the masses. It was not segregated for the upper classes, but a way to transgress all parts of society. Orating was the earliest form of storytelling. It was not necessarily a place for confrontation, but for entertainment: a balm, a tragedy, a way for individuals to understand themselves and the world around them. The Volksbühne was originally built to offer naturalist drama at prices workers could afford. When a young Bertolt Brecht arrived on the scene in the 1920s, the stage was already becoming a place for political thought. But with the Nazi seizure of power, Berlin’s theatre scene was gutted overnight. Brecht left in 1933; an entire generation of the city’s most significant theatre-makers was expelled or silenced within a year or two. In postwar Berlin, Brecht returned and, together with Helene Weigel, founded the Berliner Ensemble in 1949. But it would be a while before its political strength could be fully rebuilt. “I totally believe that, for myself, acting is still a very subversive act. Your words are your bullets, and how you pronounce the word is a political act, actually.” Lilith tells me.

The reality is that for many, a much wider and richer education happens outside of school, often from a place of repression. It develops out of what we are hungry to consume, or what has been taken away. Whether through television, our iPhones, or the books and films we read and watch obsessively, a teenager’s desire can often transcend experience. Arthur Rimbaud wrote The Drunken Boat, his great poem of the sea, at sixteen in a small provincial town, having never seen it, building the poem out of the books he had read. The imagination runs beyond the limits of travel or education. “I think that is why art is so critical to us humans,” Lilith tells me, “I totally believe in this act of catharsis. We observe something, we suffer with something we see in a movie, or wherever, in theater, but also in music or painting.” Art acts as the bridge that can connect us more deeply to life. “I strictly believe that war belongs on stage and that it belongs to the opera. It belongs to Richard Wagner. It doesn’t belong to reality. And I think if you constantly go through even the dark emotions, then you sort of free yourself from them.”

In 1938, Gallimard published Le Théâtre et son double, a collection of essays written between 1931 and 1936 by the poet, actor, writer, and playwright Antonin Artaud. For Susan Sontag, his impact was “so profound that the course of all recent serious theater in Western Europe and the Americas can be said to divide into two periods: before Artaud and after Artaud.” Artaud set the stage for a new kind of theatre, one removed from the traditional presentation of language or literature; he wanted reality before narrative. The key essays, “Theatre and the Plague,” “On the Balinese Theatre,” and “Theatre and Cruelty,” along with two manifestos of the Theatre of Cruelty, acted as its founding documents. He wanted theatre to be a place where the audience could be stripped of comfort and experience life’s brutality up close. The cruelty he explores is, in fact, a “rigor,” an intensity that removes the masks of the bourgeois who enter to be entertained. He joined the Surrealists in 1924, but André Breton expelled him in 1926 after Artaud founded the Théâtre Alfred Jarry over conflicting politics. His work was inspired by the Balinese theatre he saw at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, where the usual setting, light, and narrative fall away to give direct interaction with the actors. It was a tumultuous life, lived for the most part in extreme suffering, ostracized from society, and marked by repeated stays in asylums, where he was subjected to electroshock therapy, which he describes painfully as “keeping death incubated.” For one of the greatest and most loved writers of the 20th century, he was disenchanted with traditional literature and language, and wanted to transcend its limitations. Instead, he developed a passion for silent cinema and a determination to pursue the non-verbal.

Lilith describes the stage as she experienced it in her teenage years: as a boxing ring, “really a place for combat,” explaining that for a long time, she really saw the audience as her “worst enemies.” “Afterward, I often felt like I was beaten up or came from a battlefield.” On the other hand, she explains the energy it gave her. “I’m never as happy as when I’m on stage. I get a lot from giving myself away. I love that dedicated state. You become this animal in rituals, which you kill and give to the god. What do you call this?” “Sacrifice?” I propose. “Yes, exactly, sacrifice. But it is more than sacrifice, because you also gain so much.”

Speaking to her, I consider that one of the most terrifying experiences in our world is a growing apathy among spectators, to be able to ignore the pain and suffering of others. Conversely, coming off stage and meeting others without that intensity might be frightening. On stage, that energy is always met; when a character’s limits are pushed, it can reach further into itself. The stage becomes a place for honesty. When so much entertainment now happens within a device small enough to hold in one’s hand, there is less need for the unified, collected grief or pleasure.

I ask about the moment of the mistake on the stage, the error. “If I have experienced a mistake on a stage, it’s made me so much more present.” The moment the scalpel slips, the mask comes off, and we experience the theatre for what it is: human beings, fallible and exposed. “Funny, the audience loves it. If an actor forgets a line, the audience appreciates that most.” Yes, human errors are beautiful. “Mistakes are made in heaven. They are happy accidents. They give life to it. They are scary, but I learn from them. In fact, the things I didn’t plan often end up being the most charming and real.” To see behind the veil for a second is always exciting.

In a time when our emotions and desires (or fears and dreams) are mediated by our technologies, simply by engaging us in a back-and-forth stream of questions that serves as an endless scroll, it can be more and more confronting to get into uncomfortable emotions without answers, or even sit with the depictions of them long enough for catharsis to take hold. For Lilith, it only makes the pull of artificial intelligence less relevant. She tells me simply that she is bored by it. “I totally believe in the human, and what the human mind can do.”

The theatre seems to be one of the few places where AI would have no place. Researching it briefly, I discovered prompt machines that let actors rehearse their lines without a partner. A perfect response and timing. But what seems hard to replicate with machines is access to that sensation of catharsis, first theorized by Aristotle in Poetics and described as the witnessing of human emotion on a stage, which gives the audience an opportunity to purge the emotion that might not be accessible to them personally through the characters.

It is a concept we keep returning to throughout the call, as Lilith becomes certain that the actor’s role is to step aside, away from the center, to properly hold the role. “As an actress, you can only express what is already inside you. I would say I never stopped being Lilith. I'm always myself, but I confront my own system with the subject.” In an age of increasing unreliability of truth, it’s worth considering the stage as a place for honesty, for combat, for freedom, and why it might hold an increasingly vital place in a world governed by self-censorship and the short-attention economy.

Even the pure length of time it takes to watch a play, the endurance it asks of the audience and the sustained concentration it requires, seems harder and harder to come by. Bertolt Brecht, one of the most important names in German theatre, describes the ideal actor as someone who can act like a witness demonstrating a traffic accident to a crowd. He established the theatre as a school for critical thinking, and wanted audiences to be active rather than get lost in an emotional story. Verfremdungseffekt created physical discomfort in the audience’s experience, distancing them from the enjoyment of theatre so they could think more deeply. It was not passive. “I never felt it was my role to simply entertain,” Lilith says. Commenting on the actor’s role as someone who must be comfortable being on the edge, she does not see the role as heroic, but as fallible, insofar as viewers can place themselves there and understand a level of pain through observation.

For Ionesco, who developed anti-theatre, it was also a place to engage the absurd in a stricter sense. He created stages of a raging, hilarious farce, wanting dramatic images as immediate and irredeemably strange as dreams, so the audience must use dream logic to decode them. He made it perfectly normal for a rhinoceros to take the streets or for a corpse to grow in the bedroom. Uncanny and uncomfortable, the aim was to split middle-class life open and allow for submerged fantasies to come pulsing through. And in the age of AI, these techniques of absurdity herald that which would surely be smoothed over, or edited and suggested away.

For an actress who grew up with the stage and the theatre, I am curious to learn about Lilith’s turn to the cinema. In 2016 she starred in Nicolette Krebitz’s Wild, playing Ania, a young woman who leaves the confines of ordinary civilized life for the company of a wolf. The film won her the Günter Rohrbach Film Award for Best Actress, and it depicts a wild woman who falls in love with a wolf and, in the process, sheds behavioral standards expected of her. I asked whether working in front of a camera, rather than a live audience, offered a different kind of freedom from those same constraints. “When I was 25, I did this movie, and it really shifted something, because I realized that in front of the camera, you somehow have to lay down all your weapons,” she said. “On stage, I weapon myself, I attack. But when opposite a camera, I feel that it strips my soul. Like a striptease of your insides. You really get naked, emotionally.”

It would seem that the exposure would be more profound the other way around, given the immediacy of a performance, exposed in a body which is viewed from all sides, and that can give in to all kinds of impulses. Whereas with a camera, there is the potential for more takes, like an edit or hair and makeup fixes. But when I ask Lilith why the camera would feel more revealing than a stage, she simply says, “I think it’s the eyes. 1,000 pairs of eyes watching, real eyes,” she insists, considering the question. Whereas with the camera, it is only one: the eye of God.

In 2024, Lilith played in the film Makamisa: Phantasm of Revenge, an experimental, hand-colored silent film by Filipino director Khavn. The movie was shot entirely on 35mm, which was an entirely different experience for Lilith. “I lost my virginity as an actress,” she says, “I grew up in this digital period. I’m used to having many takes, and when I did this 35mm movie in the Philippines, with a very old camera which would make this very specific sound like a river the second it started.” It was here, beneath the sound of the film rolling, that she felt she understood what acting meant. “That acting, as in life, you don’t have a second take. You have one life, you have one chance, you have one take, you have to go for it. Everything we do is important, and you do what you have to do. I became an actress on stage, and I was used to very strong directors telling me what to do: speak louder, speak softer, cry, scream, go from left to right, whatever. And I think, in this movie, I understood that nobody tells you what to do. Just like in life, there is no God who tells you what’s right. You have to figure it out yourself. So, I think the material and the limitations of it really taught me a big lesson.”

Something in that physical manifestation of time passing, the rolling away of film which would later be hand-developed in a bathtub in Manila, and the expense of it, gave a new intensity to the filming experience. I’m reminded that, despite the popularity of digital cameras, the photography world hasn’t turned its back on film. The two exist as different methods, where one uses light and chemicals and needs a process to create an image, while the other is an instant replication. Of course, artificial intelligence in the creative process is another apparatus that will create a new experience, where one replicates and the other is made. A vampire, notably, is an old and reliable image for a copy that drains the life out of the original it feeds on.

This kind of filmmaking also creates space for improvisation. I suggest: “If we generate a prompt and expect an immediate response, it removes the space necessary for the creative process, the thinking process even, which needs imagination. It’s also where you become yourself, either as an actor or as a human being. We should not always have immediate answers to the questions, just as we shouldn’t necessarily know what is expected of us.” Lilith echoes this: “And I also believe that every human being is born with something very unique, something which belongs only to us. And then, paradoxically, we try all our lives to become like everyone else, to become like the neighbor, and to hide. And it’s interesting, because I believe that what makes us different from everyone else is our biggest treasure. Some acting institutions try to make everyone the same. When I was younger, people would often tell me, ‘With that voice, you can never become an actor,’ and I think my voice is very good for being an actor because it’s only me who has this voice now.”

In an age of social media and surveillance, when those in the creative fields are often asked to be their own PR as well as the performer, we can all consider the difference between being admired for our work or for the identity we share online, and the line is often hard to define. “When I was a teenager, I used to dress up very nicely, and I would put on makeup. The moment I became an actress, I totally changed, as if in private life, I didn’t want to be looked at. I was so much on stage that in private life, I wanted to hide.” This shedding of roles is something all women may understand, especially those who grew up in selfie culture and the age of social media, where each person has both an outward appearance for the general public and a private one mediated through a phone. Privacy becomes a much more guarded place of closure.

At this point in the conversation, I suggest that we speak about the archetype of Lilith. “When I first began to research your work, I was touched by your name, which has so many thrilling meanings. Its origins trace back to ancient Mesopotamia as the force of the wind, but Lilith is also the one who refuses to be subservient to Adam; she grows wings and flies into the night on her own volition. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo portrays Lilith as half woman, half serpent, coiled around the tree of knowledge. She is often feared for her courage and independence; in the last century she has become a feminist icon.” Lilith is the original woman who leaves, the winged she-demon of the night. The earliest roots of her archetype trace back to Sumerian storm and wind demons known as lilītu or lilû. The Book of Lilith by Jungian analyst Barbara Black Koltuv examines the archetype of Lilith. Still widely unknown or misunderstood, Lilith is the mythological seductress that has been repressed since Biblical times. She represents the essentially motherless form of the feminine Self, embodying the neglected and rejected aspects of the Great Goddess. She is always a force on the fringe of society, empowered by an internal fire which is a source of fear and rejection.

“When I observe the last fifteen years of my acting, I can really see that the meaning of my name is very much a mirror to the roles I play,” Lilith says, “I think you play what you are attracted to. Sometimes I realize there’s so much of this Lilith energy in the roles.” She considers for a moment a Latin term where your name becomes your destiny, “It really did, in my professional work.” Antigone defies the state to bury her brother. Ophelia becomes undone by a system that refuses her. Elaine Showalter’s 1985 essay “Representing Ophelia” considers Ophelia the role each era uses to show what it thinks female madness or passivity looks like.

In Wild, Ania leaves civilization altogether. “It’s much easier for me to express the unknown than to embody somebody who’s under control,” she said. “I believe every human being has a sort of inner animal, an inexpressible person. This is where art becomes so critical, because it can give language to something you have no words for. To the very unknown, the very dark, the things we cannot put into words.”

Indeed, despite incredible forward motion for the liberation of women in recent years, it is difficult to deny the myriad ways women attempt to hide the Lilith-like sides of themselves from the public. “But to expose them,” I suggest, “to take them onto a stage, is probably the most liberating way to make peace with them.”

And it is true that, for the theatre, more than the cinema, light cannot be changed to influence the image of a person, beauty tropes cannot remain fixed in the same way, bodies sweat and pulse on a stage, they give way to error and fatigue, and any Hollywood attempt at perfection is sure to be revealed. Listening to Lilith speak about this entanglement with an audience seems like the most liberating experience for a woman in our mediated world where everybody has access to a tool which can edit the image or censor themselves.

“I started to see stages, but also movie theaters, or screens, but especially stages as windows, or entrances. It allows for a window into you. You observe a different sort of life or a different sort of state of somebody.” She goes on to say, “I think I got sort of addicted to that special emotion. You only can have it on stage. It’s that dedicated state. I think it’s a state where you become a medium, you forget about yourself, and your total dedication to something else, to a thing, to a god, to a figure, to an idea.”

That sideline status is, Lilith imagines, the place for the actor, rather than one who wants to be the center of the image. Instead, an ability to free oneself from a fixed identity for a moment, a particularly liberating experience in a day when one, especially a person in the spotlight, is expected to curate their own image. “Almost all of my twenties were spent on a stage. Rehearsals every day. I had no private life.” In the boxing ring of a stage, it becomes a safe enclosure to perform these different characters, the neglected, rejected half of the old goddess figures, permanently on the fringe of respectable society, carrying an internal fire that reads to everyone else as something to fear. In 2023, Lilith took the title role in Anthropolis V: Antigone at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Karin Beier’s final chapter in a five-part cycle on the founding myths of the Theban house. Moving through white calcium dust, she danced with a skeleton in a bridal veil. Antigone buries her brother against the state’s order and is sealed alive into a tomb. I ask whether the stage gives her access to that particular nature. And Lilith replies that everybody has an interior animal.

If artificial intelligence is frightening for one thing in the creative fields, it is for its ability to remove the place for thought, experiment, error, and imagination. Lilith quotes Beckett, who says it is important to fail, fail again. “I don’t think AI can create something perfect. I think humans can create something very perfect. And perfection, for me, always includes mistakes. It’s like with faces. I think the mistake is the most interesting.”

She talked about this anticipation of perfection, saying, “In Hollywood these days everyone wants to be a superhero. But in the ‘70s, even the big Hollywood actors would always play fallible characters, who betray their wives, are ugly, and do a lot of wrong things. But you follow them, and you trust them. I don’t trust the heroic figure. I think perfection includes a very unique individual.” She also spoke about the nature of personal rupture, which leads to painful growth, far more than success teaches. “You have to dare,” she said, “I think in art, right is wrong, and wrong is right. It might be the strongest way of learning. Sometimes, you have to dare to make it very wrong. You will find a little moment, which gives you the answer. It’s the moment of giving up control. It’s very critical for actors.”

As a teenager, devouring the theatre with the hunger of somebody getting to know themself, part of that desire is about mimesis. Watching, learning, and copying. But there are powerful shifts in modernity too, like the ability to have access to everything, all the time and all at once, from film to books to art and its history. And in some ways, having access to so many worlds, so many places to jump from, may also remove the opportunity to sit in a theater for hours as a young person, to experience those gaps, and to walk home in the night considering what you’ve seen.

When we talk about AI, Lilith’s response is instinctively cautious. She tells me about her friend, the German filmmaker and philosopher Alexander Kluge, who died this year at 94. “He had such a long life through many, many different periods. And he was so curious about AI, like a kid with a new toy. I don’t like it. I’m scared of it. I feel very resistant. I think it’s more important to resist.” 

Beckett, who, like many of those anti-theatre intellectuals, came to stage and dramatic writing through a contempt for its conventions, summed up the fate of an artist in a 1949 dialogue with Georges Duthuit, reducing it to “the expression that there is nothing to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express.” And that, perhaps, replicates a modern aversion to an apparatus of AI. It will not remove the obligation.

To return to catharsis, the witnessing of an emotion, lived in a group, feels necessary. To be a spectator and an actor is to ask the audience to watch something that could fail. It is a shared risk, with a shared hope attached. Or as in the last words of Beckett’s The Unnamable: “You must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.”

Perhaps theatre, and human creation more widely, ends when it removes human error. This is what generates the beating heart, the impossibility of replication.

The Staatsoper is a Frankenstein body, destroyed and rebuilt so many times, its architecture holds human error, war, fire, and destruction. We do not put a new toy aside simply by condemning it. When most people own an iPhone that can launch them immediately onto a stage of one thousand open eyes, we continue to write, play, read, and direct in all the same ways as we have always done.  And this is an unchanging truth about human beings as they try to express themselves and find catharsis. The only concern is its intense pull, its ability to seduce and lull into a state of apathy. But not all who use AI are lost, as not all who act are performing. Invention will remain free. The fear is becoming dependent on the apparatus, financially and socially, until it ultimately produces the finished work.

From the enduring power of the stage and theatre to the changing tools each generation has to use, refuse, or play with, perhaps it is that artist’s decision to create within whichever modes they choose, not to abandon or fear them, but to encounter and interrogate them.

Returning to Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, a book written four years before her death, we arrive at the birth of the moment for which the stage is made: to hold the instant, the “living seed.”