In the rather unfortunate relationship that has prevailed for several years between defenseless novels and their more or less unscrupulous theatrical versions, which is rather unfortunate because it is largely unclear or completely asynchronous, director Rieke Süsskow has finally made things clear in at least one respect: if the narrator is silent, talk the figures.
At the same time, the opposite applies: when the narrator speaks, the actors do – nothing. They don’t talk, play, muck. They are rigid, as if frozen in the middle of a sentence, in the middle of their movements, and moreover still small-scale boxed. They turn on and off again. They die and come back to life. How then should they know what death is?
Comic figures in a display case
Katharina Linder is the almighty narrator: white-blond ponytail, bright white patent leather coat, long black latex gloves. Half dominatrix, half nurse. So a female narrator with a flattering voice who inflicts wounds and heals wounds. Sometimes like this; sometimes like that.
When she raises her voice from behind her conductor’s podium, which is sunk in the prompter’s ditch, everyone on the stage falls silent in an instant. The actors have the expression-obsessed facial expressions, gestures and body language of comic figures, the complexion from the wax museum, their language follows the principle with which Werner Schwab celebrated brilliant stage successes in the early nineties: a mixture of dialect, absurd neologisms, syntax gymnastics and the twisted twisted idioms of the petit bourgeois who would like to express themselves in a sophisticated way, but has not learned it. The language’s loss of meaning and the characters’ language impotence thus mutually increase into the grotesque and into despair. Or, as Werner Schwab would put it: “Language has nothing to say to itself.”
Dioramas that turn like carousel horses: the Frankfurt stage set by Marlene Lockemann
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Image: Jessica Schaefer
On this evening, the already limited stage of the Frankfurt Chamber Theater is reduced to several dioramas: variable display boxes that rotate around a central axis like little carousel horses. There is a fairground atmosphere, which is immediately neutralized by solemn chorale and organ sounds between the individual scenes and pictures. One could also think of “Völkerschau” or the Vienna Natural History Museum with its stuffed lions and antelopes: hunters and prey, united in motionless shock.
However, Ferdinand Schmalz does not think much of such exoticism. Everyday Austrians are alien enough for him. In his novel “My favorite animal is called Winter”, published in 2021, he tells the bizarre story of the traveling frozen food salesman Franz Schlicht, who gets caught up in a bizarre whirlpool of strange events, including suicides, frozen venison ragout, popsicles, amorous amorphous flushes of emotion , extortion, building cleaning, autopsies and Christmas tree balls with a swastika. That merrily rotting Austria, as we got to know it from Martin Schwab and in the bloodthirsty Brenner novels by Wolf Haas, is here again completely with itself. From afar greets the folk theater of Ödön von Horváth, who once timidly recalled that his characters were not “joke mirror images”.
A death-wishing bunch
Rieke Süsskow stages the Frankfurt stage version, which she created together with the dramaturge Katja Herlemann, in the style of a Moritat, a chilling ballad about love, murder and manslaughter, for which tableaux vivants are shown in the dioramas: figure arrangements, lively but motionless. The six actors, who act in changing roles, can come to life at any time: for a short dialogue, a sentence, a single word. Their wigs and half-masks reinforce the anti-naturalistic effect of Marlene Lockemann’s ingenious stage design. In the 1970s, the American sculptor Duane Hanson brought a piece of reality into the museum with his hyper-realistic figures, which suddenly lay on the floor of an exhibition hall. In their Frankfurt production, Marlene Lockmann and Rieke Süsskow go the opposite way: They bring the zombies, the artificial people who start moving or freezing as if by pressing a button, from reality onto the stage and present them in the diorama as if they were objects , immobilized, stuffed or cobbled together in a hurry.
After a good hour, however, the question arises as to whether the staging can succeed in breaking through the ever-narrowing framework of the diorama. The effects are spelled out, the frozen gestures and frozen movements begin to repeat themselves. But there is no escaping life in permafrustration, as Ferdinand Schmalz describes it. The crime plot reaches its grotesque climax with the alive burial of the frozen food driver Franz Schlicht, but the resolution of the complicated case no longer plays a role. Christina Geiße, Tanja Merlin Graf, Stefan Graf, Anabel Möbius, Melanie Straub and Wolfgang Vogler have embodied a deformed, externally controlled, incapable of life and longing for death troop that, like cartoon characters, cannot die. So they don’t know what life means either.