2023-10-21 17:05:36
The Berlin audience groans: René Pollesch, actually known as the theater’s 70-minute short-distance runner, has reinvented himself and discovered the middle distance. With a lot of camera use and little action, “Fantômas” at the Volksbühne reaches the magical three-hour limit without a break, at which the stage marathon champion Frank Castorf used to warm up.
In Bochum, Johan Simons, a fan of extended evenings at the theater, goes all out: with “The Brothers Karamazov” he cracks the seven-hour mark. Sounds sporty, but above all artistically it is an unsurpassed highlight of the theater season so far.
Thrown into stage worlds
You can lose yourself in seven hours of theater – and in Bochum you can too. There is a peculiar charm that comes from overly long evenings at the theater. The 24-hour spectacle “Infinite Fun” at Hebbel am Ufer, ten hours of “Dionysus City” by Christopher Rüping or – also ten hours – Peter Stein’s legendary “Wallenstein”, these are stage worlds into which you are thrown.
And the more exhaustion increases, the more resistance dwindles and aesthetic borderline experiences become possible. It takes trust to devote almost half a day to art: a lifetime that doesn’t want to be experienced as empty, but rather condensed.
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Simons, artistic director at the Bochum Schauspielhaus, divides the last of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s great novels into three parts like a triptych, none of which lasts more than two hours. In between, borscht is served, tables and beer benches are set up in the foyer, and the beetroot-colored stew is served to the audience in large bowls.
Anyone who remembers what they read can entertain their table companions with the story of the Grand Inquisitor. This is announced before the meal in the kitchen stage setting with sliced heads of white cabbage, but is left out on stage afterwards.
The stark clarity of a chessboard
Making a version of the monumental novel, which runs over 1,000 pages, is a difficult task that Bochum’s chief dramaturg Angela Obst masters with confidence. It relies on the psychological and philosophical moments, not only is the well-known internal narrative of the Grand Inquisitor left out, but the trial in court is also not presented as such, and Russian kitsch certainly not.
As in Simons’ slim “Hamlet,” it is an arrangement of figures with the sparse clarity of a chessboard. The individual traits stand out clearly and group themselves into constellations: love, money, family, religion.
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Scandal of “Manta Manta”-Dreh
Wolfgang Menardi’s stage is an intermediate space of the metaphysical in which all people are homeless, “transcendentally homeless,” as the passionate Dostoyevsky reader Georg Lukács put it. The old religion is on the ground, only ruins, fragments and rubble, the onion domes lie around like boulders.
All around it, the “white cube” rises up, radiant and sacred, as the new transcendental – the “white cell”, as it is said in Brian O’Doherty’s classic. The old has not yet passed away, becoming eclectic decor that you cling to nostalgically or angrily. And what’s new? Appears ice cold and relentless. Can you actually live with that – and how?
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The Karamazov brothers are seekers of meaning and happiness in a confusing world. There is Aljoscha, played brilliantly by Dominik Dos-Reis, who ends up in the monastery in search of devotion and forgiveness. He is pushed and repelled like a pinball ball, unable to calm and pacify the turbulent instinctual lives of those around him, no matter how hard he tries.
Instead, he gets carried away, like Victor IJdens as Dimitrij, who goes to extremes in his enthusiasm and desperation. The wonderfully laconic Steven Scharf is the opposite in mental temperature as Ivan, an enlightened cynic.
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The three brothers each seem separated and inhibited from life in their own way. Restless and unsatisfied, they remain tied to a vague promise of salvation. They are just as ominously tied to the superfather, wonderfully played by Pierre Bokma in his Nietzschean uncouth power.
A man of power who takes and enjoys, who commands and forbids. And who, in all his fluffy grandeur, seems to stand in the light of his sons. They envy him. And more: they wish him dead. When the old man is murdered in the end, it is not the suspected Dimitrij, but the disowned fourth son: the enigmatic Smerdyakov (Oliver Möller).
A dark shadow on desire
Like “Oedipus the King” and “Hamlet,” “The Brothers Karamazov” is the great drama of parricide – and just as disturbing. As with ancient fate, there is no escape from the feeling of guilt that lies like a dark shadow over wishes and desires.
Raging with admiration and envy, you wanted to usurp your father’s power and ultimately be yourself. But in death the identification fails, and the father’s law takes even more cruel revenge. Everything is allowed? And at the same time, nothing is possible anymore because everything is gripped by an unrestrained, raging feeling of guilt – as with the era of postmodern “Anything Goes,” which is tipping ever more clearly into a new totalitarianism.
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The dialectic of a liberation that leads to ever-increasing debt runs through “The Brothers Karamazov”. This becomes clear in Bochum in the love for the various women: Anne Rietmeijer plays Gruschenka, who is courted by father and son Dimitrij, the libidinal motive for the patricide can hardly be drawn more clearly, from such a merciless naivety regarding one’s own ability to fulfill the desire of one to awaken other people so that it hurts most tenderly.
While Lise (Danai Chatzipetrou), who sits in a wheelchair, is left with little more than pity from Aljoscha, which she is not keen on. There is no trace of relaxation, let alone redemption, all that remains is self-torturing excess and resentment.
Hyperrealistic, dark commercial kitchen
Just as Dostoyevsky masterfully mirrors patricide and deicide in his novel as a nihilistic crime and epochal drama, there is also a metaphysical side in Bochum, which the audience discovers in the second part. The large stage takes you into the Kammerspiele, where a hyper-realistic, dark commercial kitchen is set up.
You go in through a swinging door like in a fast-paced tabloid comedy, go out again via a staircase, all sorts of dishes and white cabbage are flying around, country music is playing on the radio. What manifests itself on the big stage as a paralyzing deceleration is completed here into a dialectical image of a frantic standstill.
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At the end – after the borscht – we go back to the big stage, which is now covered with artificial snow and shows another temperature drop below zero, the image of a cold and frozen society. The beginnings of a new ethics without God, they still lie like hardy tubers in the frost under the blanket of snow, waiting for a new spring.
The step of metaphysically dispossessed people out of the desert of the real is not yet successful. Simons began his Dostoyevsky expedition with “The Idiot” at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and “Demons” at the Burgtheater in Vienna. Now he is storming to the pinnacle of theater art with “The Brothers Karamazov,” where Castorf alone has so far reached in 2015 with his, also seven hours ongoing “Karamazov” production.
True play is a serious matter
One can hardly praise this “Karamasov” evening in Bochum enough: outstanding actors, precise direction, an exuberant stage design and wonderful costumes by Katrin Aschendorf, almost everything is right here. And so it never gets boring. There are three hours of theater in Berlin that feel longer because they negotiate less. In Bochum there is only a sense for the non-serious insofar as real play is a serious matter – but not that serious. Like on the stage of life. There is hardly a better antidote to murder and manslaughter in the name of faith and theocracy.
“The Brothers Karamazov” at the Schauspielhaus Bochum, again on November 4th and 5th and December 9th and 10th
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