2023-05-29 16:10:27
The 60th Theatertreffen presented a kind of searching new beginning after the pandemic and ended with a Gorki, a Handke and a “Hamlet” guest performance.
Mateja Koležnik’s production of Maxim Gorki’s drama “Children of the Sun” Matthias Horn
“Finally open your eyes!” Liza Protasova exclaims in Maxim Gorky’s play “Children of the Sun”. “See that more and more people hate each other.” But the distinguished society in the house of the Protasovs – doctors, artists, scientists – does not like to be disturbed by the resentment on the street. Here, between the laboratory and the music room, light reason prevails, with which one is somewhat distracted, but mostly experiments, writes poetry and paints in a good mood and believes in a better future. Reality? This does not lie in the many unpaid bills on Protasov’s desk or in the cholera-infested servants’ house next door, but in the knowledge of the chemical composition of things and the belief in the good in people.
The stubborn escapism of the academic society that Maxim Gorki describes connects tsarist Russia of 1905 with the totalitarian war state of today, in which even the thinking elite withdraws into its own world. The gap between reality and appearance is widening, and so Mateja Koleznik’s excessively realistic production from Bochum, which opened the final weekend of the Theatertreffen, can definitely be understood as a full criticism of this retreat into cloud cuckoo land, whether based on reason or blind desires. And yet the bourgeois ambience of the old building, which the stage designer Raimund Orfeo Voigt built on the Festspielhaus stage with hyper-realistic cinematic accuracy, inevitably creates a bridge to the here and now. Because there we are now sitting in the dark auditorium and following the Protassows in their vain and intimate activities – one runs from one room to the other, the next one photographs what comes before his lens, and everyone is madly in love with each other – but none of this has any relevance beyond the private sphere.
An endlessly repeating zombie hamlet
Koleznik amplifies this by having her characters mumble incomprehensibly while standing with their backs to the audience. And in precisely this social ignorance you suddenly catch yourself simply by sitting there and being interested in the narcissistic idealism of these people and a radically hermetic staging. This goes on for two hours, until a loud bang finally opens the eyes of the last spectators to the fact that the Theatertreffen as a whole is basically stuck in a Protasov bubble. We sit in the theater and hope for social relevance, but here a production demonstratively smacks us in the face with exactly this smug, purely academic hope. A cold swipe that undoubtedly deserves its place in the ten-choice. Perhaps a minimum requirement, but at least a noticeable one, apart from the hopelessly kitschy festival start of the Munich TV theater marathon “Das Vermächtnis” and the final performance, a zombie “Hamlet” from Dessau that is repeated forever in the empty theater loop, with all shares invitations. Nevertheless, they did not represent a brilliant, but rather a persistent, searching theater year this year.
In Rieke Süsskow’s Viennese production of Peter Handke’s old age text “Zwietalk” one felt a bit like the Protassows. It is true that stage designer Mirjam Stängl unfolds a thoroughly artificial space that represents a nightmarish old people’s home factory with built-in euthanasia and urn burial. What is Protassow about it, however, is Handke’s text itself. In it, two old gentlemen converse in the form of an infinitely vain reflection on “grandfatherhood”, which tells of nothing other than the loss of their way of looking at the world: no longer a “cult”. , no “momentum”! Nevertheless, Süsskow manages to turn the weak text into interesting theater by finding its innermost being, namely the fear of death. The surreal setting thus becomes the old people’s fear projection and their one-sided dialogue becomes a cross-generational interplay of many. Despite the Burgtheater grandees Martin Schwab, Branko Samarovski and Hans Dieter Knebel, the evening remains tough, but the director’s exceptionally confident, imaginative breakdown of the text justifies every honor.
No mercy, however, for the “Hamlet” at the end, which despite the microports is barely understandable, which Philipp Preuss arranged on a spectacular table that felt like thirty meters long. A technical problem or wanted? At least devastating for everyone who doesn’t carry their “Hamlet” around with them all the time. However, most of the time it doesn’t matter who is speaking, because all the characters have their doubles or revenants who share Hamlet’s monologues in multiple repetitions, individually or in groups. Curtains and gauze rags fluttering open and shut, onto which close-ups are projected, leave no doubt that appearance and reality are just as out of joint here as the state itself. So the whole court is hopelessly stuck with the poor prince: not in the “ Being”, not even in “non-being”, but in the accursed “or”. And so they all go on muttering “or,” the key word of our time, damn or self-damn, until the day of hell.
“The Bus to Dachau” by De Warme WinkelIsabel Machado Rios
Rethink the structure
All in all, apart from the stirring performance “Der Bus nach Dachau” by De Warme Winkel, you saw something more tried and tested, a theater that is only slowly getting going again after the years of the pandemic and is looking for its form. A more difficult construction site is the organization of the Theatertreffen itself, which should definitely reconsider the structure and content of its supporting program “10 meetings”. Instead of superficially thrown together performances that turned out to be rather weak in the crowd, it should focus on concentration and quality. Maybe then, instead of bad contrast, it initiates broadening connections.
#Balance #sheet #Theatertreffen #Hoping #social #relevance