2024-01-27 12:43:34
Big drama at the beginning: “Don’t shoot!” a woman’s voice shrills from behind through the wooden wall that is still blocking the stage at this moment. But along with the screaming, blazingly bright rays of light and smoke bite their way through the cracks in the boards and far into the auditorium, so that you can’t help but imagine something martial behind them.
With a great noise, the wall slams forward and a small man becomes visible, who, however, appears intact and fearless in the bright room. And as he slowly creeps forward, the next wall turns up behind him again, making the playing field small again.
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Mateja Koleznik, the master of the hidden game
Dark, furtive and locked out of the actual center of the public, placed in a narrow back area of conspiracy, it will remain for the next hour and a half in the BE, where the Slovenian director Mateja Koleznik, master of the literally covert, hidden game, Jean Paul Sartre’s political decision-making drama “The Dirty Hands” staged. Soon nothing reminds us of the screaming prelude, but there remains an aggressive basic tension that never allows us to forget that the scurried duel between the two comrades Hugo and Hoederer that follows is against the background of a war, at least an extremely hard, rough and rigorous one Times take place in which every decision is always one about being or not being.
Even though Sartre had the real-historical resistance strategies of the communist parties in mind when writing the piece in 1948, the structural struggle that he lets his two opponents carry out in it is as relevant as ever. Apart from the martial mission with which the young comrade Hugo is supposed to liquidate his inconvenient superior Hoederer, their dispute is about the politically ethical question of the ability to compromise in general. About how much pragmatic power instinct a party can tolerate without betraying its ideological program, but also how far each individual can relativize their beliefs without becoming hollow and unbelievable.
And yet a director would have to reveal the transparency of the piece to today if it had to be filled with the present.
Koleznik, however, does the opposite: she pulls it together, sticks to the text and turns it into a dark chamber piece for harried corners. That’s good on the surface, but not enough in terms of content. Paul Zichner plays the principled Hugo, who rises out of the smoke at the beginning, as a slight, insecure man who would rather fiddle with his weapon than forge large alliances, while the jovial comrade Hoederer is not alien to anything human and also makes pacts with royalists. But Marc Oliver Schulze brings him closer to the opponent with a nervous stubbornness, which neutralizes their duel into facelessness. At the end there was a lot of noise again, without any response.
“The Dirty Hands” is still on February 17th and 18th and March 12th and 13th Berliner Ensemble to see.
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