Clara (Toini Ruhnke) takes a beating that afternoon. Again and again her head hits the edge of the table after being hit by her brother Lothar (Pascal Houdus). Again and again she is thrown backwards, rolls over as she falls and comes to rest on the wooden floor.
The rock song “Whip The Night” by Anna Calvi is played live by Philipp Plessmann on keyboards, Theresa Stark on drums and Nick McCarthy on bass. Ruhnke already has a clearly visible bruise. Now she puts on knee pads. Another hit, another bounce. “Very good,” says director Charlotte Sprenger happily on the rehearsal stage in Gaußstraße, “we’ll do that again.”
The choreography of the beating scene has to be right when “The Sandman” as a rock opera by Anna Calvi and Robert Wilson based on the story by ETA Hoffmann, which was published in 1816, celebrates its premiere on March 26 at the Thalia Theater. This Sandman is not for children or the faint of heart. He rips out the eyes of children who don’t want to sleep, and sprinkles coarse grains inside everyone else’s. With his story about poor Nathanael (Merlin Sandmeyer), who feels pursued by the murderous Sandman and believes he recognizes him in other people until he falls madly to his death, Hoffmann created the best-known horror fairy tale of the Romantic era.
Charlotte Sprenger is directing the play at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg
Source: Bertold Fabricius
Hoffmann’s language is already wonderfully eerie for the reader: “The sandman, the terrible sandman”, as the original says, “is the old lawyer Coppelius, who sometimes has lunch with us. But the most hideous figure could not have terrified me more deeply…”
The director likes to use the effect. “ETA Hoffmann’s language has a very good stage effect, much stronger than I expected,” says Sprenger happily. After three productions at Thalia in Gaußstrasse, she made the step to the big stage at Alstertor with “Sandman”. The 32-year-old daughter of actress Victoria Trauttmansdorff and director Wolf-Dietrich Sprenger associates many childhood memories with this place.
It all starts harmlessly at first
Charlotte Sprenger is now unleashing the full power of the theater at Thalia herself. Her production is based on Calvi’s songs and Hoffmann’s story, but compared to Wilson’s iconic work with stylish costumes and fairytale stage sets at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus in 2017, “We’re doing something completely different aesthetically,” says Sprenger, “that has nothing to do with Robert Wilson’s version to do. It stands very much on its own and it would be pointless for me to reproduce it. We develop our own stage story.”
The new stage design by Aleksandra Pavlovic shows an absurd restaurant with a large table in the middle and many chairs. In this shop, which may have seen many a family celebration, there is a waiter (André Szymanski) who practically lives there. “Nathanael takes this waiter,” said Sprenger, “for Coppola, for Coppelius, for the Sandman. But he’s a long way from being the sandman. In the beginning it is very clear that it is a projection. But then the waiter starts doing things that make you think, ‘Oh yes, maybe he’s not just a harmless waiter after all.’” In addition to the waiter, Szymanski also plays the hero’s three nemesis (Coppelius aka Coppola aka the Sandman ). Gabriela Maria Schmeide is Nathanael’s mother on stage.
The Sandman’s fantasy world is firmly linked to reality, the horror unfolding its terror from a seemingly solid base that is beginning to falter. The viewer knows that from the novels of Stephen King or from the film director David Lynch. It all starts out harmless, then something weird happens. “David Lynch’s film ‘Blue Velvet’ is practically the sandman, to put it the other way around: ETA Hoffmann is the lynch of romance,” says Sprenger and states: “The horror is always a criticism of the existing conditions, of the American dream, of the bourgeois , in the unswerving belief in progress.”
Not much else is certain in the wide range of possible interpretations of the story about Nathanael, his fiancée Clara, his friends Siegmund and Lothar. The two main interpretations are: either Nathanael is insane. This is supported by the fact that he thinks the robot doll Olimpia is a real woman and falls in love with her.
Maybe he’s blind before the sandman can rob him of his eyes, in which case the threat is only inside him. Or does the cruel, haunted Sandman really exist, and Olimpia is his deceptively real work and Nathanael falls victim to him, just like his father before him, who dies in an explosion during alchemical experiments – the starting point of the Sandman trauma. The actor and musical director Philipp Plessmann takes on the father role.
Sigmund Freud developed the thesis that the uncanny is not caused by the enigmatic Sandman, but by the loss of his victims’ eyes. Freud equates this loss with castration and asks: “Why does the sandman always appear as a disturber of love?”
For Sprenger, Nathanael is insane, but only to the extent of the world around him. “One could ask the heretical question whether we all have no choice but to be insane, when the world is just getting more and more insane and its existence apparently depends on the insane,” says Sprenger.
Even this interpretation does not absolve the insane from responsibility for their actions, explains the director. ETA Hoffmann, who was originally called Ernst Theodor Wilhelm and later changed his name to Ernst Theodor Amadeus as an admirer of Mozart, worked for many years alternately as a musician and as a lawyer. As a lawyer, he pleaded for conviction in the case of a man who had killed his wife, even though the killer was delusional.
Because madness, according to the poet, is part of the human being, belongs inseparably to it. This means that even the insane is guilty and must be sentenced accordingly. The case under discussion later inspired Georg Büchner to write his “Woyzeck”, which, however, was driven insane by a doctor. If there is healing, if rescue is at hand, it is in the theatre.
„The Sandman”, opera by Anna Calvi and Robert Wilson based on the story by ETA Hoffmann, Thalia Theater, premiere: March 26, performances: March 27, 30. On selected dates, “Der Sandmann” is accompanied by the supporting program “Hymns to the Night”, from 5 p.m. with tours through the city to the hymn in front of the Thalia Theater at midnight.