Falk Richter stages “Asche” by Elfriede Jelinek at the Munich Kammerspiele

2024-04-27 14:29:44

Two years ago, Elfriede Jelinek announced that her husband Gottfried Hüngsberg had suddenly died. “I’m devastated,” she said at the time. She was married to the computer scientist and film composer for almost 50 years. The Nobel Prize winner for literature dedicated her new play “Asche”, which has now premiered at the Munich Kammerspiele, to the man in her life. In her major obituary, Jelinek connects the personal loss with the global loss caused by the climate catastrophe.

As is usual with Jelinek, “Asche” is not a theater text with characters and a dramatic plot, but rather a river of language that, through many rivulets, connects to form a large river and flows into a river delta with countless open ends. These “text areas,” as it is called about Jelinek’s post-drama, are a challenge for the director. The premiere of “Asche” comes from Falk Richter, who successfully staged Jelinek’s Trump play “Am Königsweg” in Hamburg in 2017.

Jelinek’s finely woven, melancholic text, which revolves around the irretrievable nature of all living things, is less than 25 pages long. Nothing lasts, everything passes. The unstable carbon compounds decay and the rest is ash. “Everything burned. “It’s all ash,” says Jelinek. With her there is no idealization of nature as eternal or benevolent. Nature is restlessness, a process of growth and decay in which there is no way back – it just goes on. “A new beginning? That doesn’t work.”

A great ensemble

Katrin Hoffmann placed a deep black volcanic stone on the stage, with an antenna on it, and behind it a circular horizon for Lion Bischof’s video projections. The summit of a mountain from which one looks down on the world with Nietzschean pathos of distance. Or like “The Wanderer Above the Sea of ​​Fog” by Caspar David Friedrich, which is placed in the middle of the stage in one scene. Far from people, with a view of the impenetrable – this pose is shared by Jelinek and German Romanticism.

Mourning could almost be romantic: scene photo from “Asche” at the Munich Kammerspiele

Quelle: Maurice Korbel

Later, the volcano itself, bathed in red light, spews mist while the great ensemble – Bernardo Arias Porras, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova, Johanna Kappauf, Thomas Schmauser and Ulrike Willenbacher – crawls over the rock like the first people. Or the last people? In another scene, the summit is completely littered with rubbish, especially with accessories from maritime mass tourism, and a Lieferando driver also pours a lot of plastic packaging waste out of his box.

A few scenes later, a walking globe appears with smoke rising from it. He screams for help, concretely and now – and not a “shitty text”. The rubbish is removed and you can see the ruins of lost civilizations from ancient Egypt to the Aztecs via video. At some point some Terminator fantasy birds come crawling out of the volcano and a neon tube monster swings across the stage. You have now landed in what feels like the fifth final picture and are as exhausted as the earth.

The sheer iconoclasm

It’s not even possible to begin to convey the amount of moods, atmospheres, costumes and playing styles that will be brought to the stage that evening; it’s an exorbitant amount of consumption. A theatrical incinerator of the worst kind, pulverizing everything and leaving little more than aesthetic piles of ash. Such a constant bombardment of images is often reverently called “iconoclasm” by critics, as if the sheer mass of bombardment were a substitute for precision.

What “iconoclasm” lacks is a sensuality that goes beyond superficial irritation of the retina. But you already know exactly from everyday life, the constant stream of images that pass you by without experience. Couldn’t theater work to search for the lost experience? And resist the culture-industrial iconoclasm? Of course, this is a fundamental objection that also applies to other Jelinek productions such as those by Nicolas Stemann, who made “Sonne, go now!” in Zurich almost two years ago.

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And it’s not as if Richter couldn’t create theatrical images that go into depth. With “Asche” you just get the impression that he is tearing it down before he has finished building it. The feeling of being at the mercy of the frail body in the hospital bed, screaming, panting, wheezing, is washed away in the next moment with a “National Geographic” slide show that borders on embarrassing, and shortly afterwards the now almost common catastrophe porn (fires, floods, bombs, …) is shown. chased across the screen.

What touches are the moments of complete loss, as can be found in the recurring line “I went out in the silent night over the dark heath,” which is taken from the “Songs of a Traveling Journeyman” by the late romantic Gustav Mahler. It seems as if Jelinek is being lost to the world. “Old age without God. Earth without people,” she says. Jelinek does not believe in transhumanism, the complete liberation from the body in which the ego becomes a disembodied and therefore god-like substance: “Everyone dies alone.”

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In the end, Jelinek returns to the ground she reached with the death of her husband. They are sentences full of pain and sadness: “My dear darling, we will no longer have ground under our feet, we will be ground ourselves, isn’t that nice! Yes, not only you, my love, no longer exist, since you no longer exist, there are no more people in the world,” it says in “Ashes”. Or: “Well, his body was already in the fire, he has already had this experience, he has it ahead of me.” At one point, an urn is carried across the stage.

The problem remains: it is as if Richter’s directorial fireworks bury and suffocate the delicacy of Jelinek’s text itself under a shower of ash. But in the theater something like this is not the last word on a stage text. Hamburg’s Thalia Theater has already announced that Jette Steckel will direct “Asche” in the new season.

“Ash” by Elfriede Jelinek at the Munich Kammerspiele