In the 1967 yearbook of the Swiss Society for Theatre Culture, Edmund Stadler writes of a “more or less eventful (school theatre) history of over a thousand years” and mentions the first European (!) document of “mimic school customs”, a document from the monastery of St. Gallen, the “Triduum” with the performance of the “Abbas scholasticus”, the student abbot and his two student chaplains. For Central Switzerland, he mentions the oldest play about saints in Switzerland from the 12th century, a Latin school play about St. Nicholas of Myra, the patron saint of pupils, which was intended for the school theatre of the Benedictines in Einsiedeln. Religious themes were therefore dominant. The earliest source for a staged performance by the Engelberg student theatre is the “Younger Engelberg Easter Play”, written in 1372. Interestingly, it was primarily the Reformed cantons that ensured the “first heyday” of school theatre at the time of European humanism; the Catholic cantons followed in the wake of the Counter-Reformation and set strong accents with the so-called “Jesuit Theater”. With the establishment of their first college in Lucerne around 1579, the Jesuit school theatre tradition began immediately. “Without theatre, poetry freezes” was their motto, and so for over 200 years they ensured that baroque school theatre flourished with “annual Latin dramas of a moral-pedagogical and counter-reformatory nature”. Naturally, these performances were intended for “higher circles” and, according to Stadler, were “a substitute for the baroque court theatre that was missing in Switzerland”. Plays about saints, biblical and religious plays, Christian and pagan heroic plays dominated. Shortly before the dissolution of the order (1773), German-language performances were also introduced. The Benedictines in Einsiedeln, Schwyz and Engelberg competed with the Jesuits. The Enlightenment, for its part, provided Swiss national themes. In Stans, for example, the Capuchins had their pupils perform a play entitled “The Confederates divided over the Burgundian booty, agreed upon by the versatile Brother Nicolaus von Flüe” by P. Venantius von Matt in 1780. And in Lucerne, “the former fathers Josef Ignaz Zimmermann and Franz Regis Krauer founded a national Swiss school theatre”. While schools in many places in the reformed cantons had to discontinue their theatre work as early as the 17th century – due to moral laws – the Catholic collegiate theatres in Altdorf, Einsiedeln, Immensee, Sarnen, Schwyz, Stans and Engelberg continued their theatre tradition to this day. The forms and characteristics of this “school theatre” over the centuries are barely comprehensible today. But in the sense of a “Biblia pauperum”, i.e. a “Bible for the poor”, it probably ensured that material and stories were conveyed and appropriated in a vivid way.
It is to be hoped that the collaboration between the “Magister ludi” and the (male!) students was already fun and humorous back then and provided magical moments, as I mentioned at the beginning, and as they are still evident today when, for example, children and young people who begin to stammer under stress in everyday life speak and act freely on stage, in front of an audience.
And today?
Today, as in Engelberg, every Gymnasium in Central Switzerland offers an annual theatre programme as part of an elective or optional course. This means that a group of theatre enthusiasts from different classes and year groups come together to put on a play. The theatre at the Gymnasium is oriented towards professional theatre and is usually based on texts and plays from the great theatre literature. There are then more or less classical productions, but in the best case scenario, the text is reworked and brought to the stage in a way that is suitable for young people.
In most cases, it is not possible without additional evening and weekend rehearsals, during which they can work more quietly and with more concentration than in the off-peak hours after a busy day at school. However, as the enthusiastic students are there voluntarily, this is often not a problem. And yes, because playing theatre is fun
Franziska Bachmann Pfister
Head of Elective Course Theatre at the Stiftsschule Engelberg
Literature references: My contribution on the subject of “school theatre” in the book “Bühnenlandschaften – Theater in der Zentralschweiz”, Lucerne, 2015 and the book by Vera Paulus, “Oper in der Klosterschule – Musik und Theater im Kloster Engelberg”, Zurich, 2010