Honored reading public! I originally had a plan for this text: The Frankenstein story is currently running twice on stage in Berlin. Three actors play in the Deutsches Theater: Mary Shelley’s novel in changing roles Frankenstein and on the 3rd floor of the Volksbühne there is an arrangement under the title I spit on my grave to see. (In addition, a challenging adaptation has been running in Hanover since mid-October: Frankenstein or a fresh cell treatment.) The analysis-mad monster in me had awakened smacking his lips. What! Says! US! This! Text! Today? What conclusions would one be able to draw about science and responsibility, otherness in the world, radical loneliness and rejected love? I wanted to write a wonderful text for you with elegant passages about the experience of transcendental homelessness and how this can be overcome in the theater. Once in a while.
But I don’t know how it came about, whether I couldn’t keep an eye on the time because of the sheer hasty emotion, at least I missed the performance at the Volksbühne last week. Well, I thought, I still have a chance. But then a stubborn sentence began to get in the way of my plan: “Unfortunately, due to an illness in the ensemble, the performance has to be canceled.” Instead perhaps Hauptmann’s Lonely people with a queer twist? “Unfortunately, due to an illness in the ensemble, the performance has to be canceled.” Now finally tossing my elegant text overboard, I wanted to drag myself to the Gorki Theater, to Yael Ronens Death Positive, but as the title actually already announced, here too (attention, variant): “Unfortunately, for reasons of planning, the performance has to …”
Wait a moment. In the past, so I probably mean the pre-pandemic age, the tough motto at the theater was: “The cloth has to go up.” The cloth here means the curtain. I know hair-raising stories in which actors collapsed behind the scenes and had to be resuscitated while the stage manager yelled at everyone else: “Go on, go on!” How many performances have I seen where assistant director or drama college: jumped in with a text book for the sick, often scooping up the laughs when they wandered across the stage without orientation. Philipp Hochmair, who spent the night two years ago Anyone for the sick Tobias Moretti? Has been hailed as the “summer fairy tale of Salzburg”.
The show must go on – this phrase used to describe the art of theater that burns everything else. Does “everything can, nothing has to” apply now? Has the omnipresence of disease and mortality, the increased sensitivity to human disability per se during the pandemic, already initiated a cultural change in the theater? Burn-out and overload – these were the topics that recently haunted the theater system. During the closings, more relaxed fixtures and more sustainability in dealing with the resource actor: in were discussed. Do the accumulations of missed performances at many theaters suggest that you have arrived at a different attitude towards the Betriebswerk Mensch?
Then last week I went home and did what I’ve been doing for a year and a half. I ended up in some media library and saw a documentary about the author Thomas Brasch, who was looking for redemption in writing for the theater. Then I was back to my Frankenstein topic: How do we, as creatures thrown into the world, start the best possible life? And does the theater perhaps ask this question by simply dropping the performances from time to time?
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