In recent years, Jan Bosse has become something of the theater expert for trips to the border areas between madness and reality. In other words, journeys that, like the happily unhappy “Don Quixote”, climb into the regions of enthusiastic fantasy and yet know how to take the hair-sharp serpentines between reality and fiction with elegance. It has been running in the Deutsches Theater for two years with the two knight clowns Wolfram Koch and Samuel Finzi. But also journeys that meander through the mazes of one’s own psychoses, as in Thomas Melle’s autobiographical analysis of illnesses “The world behind you”. Three years ago this made waves at the Berlin Theatertreffen, where Bosses’ Viennese production was invited and already then presented Joachim Meyerhoff’s talent as a tireless solo worker on his own “I”.
On this very special evening in the Schaubühne, too, Bosse and Meyerhoff are busy again on such an inner journey. This time it is Christian Kracht’s, who after his debut “Fiberland” 25 years ago with its sequel “Eurotrash” not only continues to explore his own borderland of biographical-fictional narration, but also his 80-year-old mother on the way takes. Precisely in this, Kracht’s novel is as bitterly angry as it is touching and bizarre journey into wandering regions, especially the one between life and death. Geographically, it leads from Zurich over the Saanenland up to the glacier on the Col du Pillon to Geneva, but maybe it just went from the mother’s Zurich apartment to the mental hospital in Winterthur, where the “outside and inside” sick woman had already spent a lot of time and soon also faces its end.
Clearly decided against reality
Despite all the surreal twists and turns of the crazy taxi tour, one hardly doubts when reading the novel that mother and son will actually make this last trip, even if the filled ostomy bag on their artificial anus makes the situation grotesque and the consumption of tablets and alcohol increases their fitness makes athletic ascent and descent. But the stubborn will of this terribly rich, eccentric lady, who affords to rock 600,000 francs around the world in a plastic bag, but before entering a restaurant, gets the tremor because of the nonchalance with her battered face and greasy hair Believes lost, seems indestructible. Her actual longing destination is Africa, but for the time being she is satisfied with Switzerland, after all, Christian organized the tour, and it goes to places of memory, even if they are rarely good.
Jan Bosse made a clear decision against reality from the start and put everything into a game with the imagination and the art of staging of the theater itself. Meyerhoff does not initially appear as the smug first-person narrator of the novel, but as a parka-wearing Schluffi director with a chin beard, who applies props and controls a ship that is still waiting in the lower stage, which he later shows up for the staged journey of thought with his mother . Only when he started to talk did he slowly change into Christian, the fair-haired boy in a light blue designer suit, who after just a few sentences settles the accounts of the impostor of his broken family: the sado-masochistic Nazi grandfather and father’s nouveau riche upstart.
Then Angela Winkler flits up
But then Angela Winkler flits up in a bright yellow costume, with a purple wig and a scab of blood on her forehead and chin and she is immediately the stubborn, vulnerable, magical center of the evening. Meyerhoff always has to do something, fetch it, change it slapstick-like – actually too much actionism – she usually sits or stands motionless at the railing, and looks all the more intensely from her deep black, eerily enigmatic eyes into the world that has become strange. Who better than Angela Winkler to portray the brutal, poetic, childishly whimsical complainant with the incorruptible view into the depths of her life and the whole world? And how does she manage this fantastic concentration on a deeply sad, unruly woman at the end of her path! Big mother finale.
.