2023-04-29 08:07:23
Et is every theater director’s nightmare: after weeks of rehearsals, the moment has come when the joint work sees the light of day. But shortly before the premiere, a leading actor gets out. What to do? Fabian Hinrichs, the director of this nightmare, has to make a decision after a sleepless night. In the end he takes the costume, grabs the libretto and goes on stage himself. He has to do it to save his own work.
On Monday, three days after the improvised premiere, Hinrichs is sitting in his apartment in Potsdam. Books on Enlightenment, Romanticism, art and philosophy are stacked in front of the desk. They are the materials for the piece, which goes by the exotic-sounding name “Sardanapal”. As Hinrichs wrote a few years ago in an essay in the FAZ, it is a “forgotten mixture of tragedy, burlesque and melodrama”, written by the famous dandy and romantic Lord Byron.
Hinrichs can talk for hours about Byron and the conflict between rationalism and romanticism in modernity, about the absolute, about longing and utopia in art. “I feel a great fascination for romance,” says Hinrichs. He wanted to bring them to the stage. When narrating, he comes from Hölderlin to Heidegger to Kurt Cobain, from world pain to self-destruction. “Sardanapal” is about the last Assyrian king, a hedonist and despiser of state affairs, who in the end chooses to go to the stake with his beloved. It is the tragic demise of a beautiful soul.
At the end of last year, Hinrichs decided to bring the forgotten play to the stage himself. There was a gap in the schedule of the Berlin Volksbühne. Contrary to popular belief, this is by no means his first directing experience. “For more than ten years I have also been directing the evenings with René Pollesch,” says Hinrichs – only his participation was never expressly mentioned until the great success of “Believe in the Possibility of Complete Renewal of the World” in Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast. Hinrichs looks for and finds comrades-in-arms: the actress Lilith Stangenberg and the musician Sir Henry. And the title role? An actor from the ensemble answers: Benny Claessens.
Claessens polarizes: for some he is a genius, a magician of stage presence. “When Benny Claessens leaves the stage, you’re sad,” said none other than Hinrichs himself in 2018, who awarded Claessens the Alfred Kerr Prize at the Theatertreffen. In the same year, Claessens was voted Actor of the Year in a critics’ poll. For the others, Claessens is an overestimated self-promoter who reacts aggressively to criticism. He recently described a critic as mentally disturbed and added: “Your time is over, darling!” Hinrichs tries it. He doesn’t want to stand alone on stage this evening, as is so often the case, but dare to share a theatrical utopia. A romantic idea?
The demand is big
When you visit a rehearsal ten days before the premiere, there is a busy atmosphere. Hinrichs sets up the big stage, he discusses the processes with technology, light, stage, costumes, music and dancers, while Stangenberg and Claessens fool around. With his long legs, Hinrichs trudges through the rows of chairs in the stalls, a microphone in his hand. “I have to think out loud now,” he calls out. Because the replicas are lost in the darkness of the hall, you don’t feel like you’re at a rehearsal, but like you’re in one of those great Hinrichs monologues. You can see how meticulously Hinrichs builds pictures, how he creates atmospheres. He asks, “Is that good?” Nod. “Are you feeling better?” Shaking his head. “Good!” You leave the rehearsal with the anticipatory impression that this is an evening that is made to last forever – and not just for half a season.
Hinrichs is a theater dreamer, even a theater romantic. “Don’t be afraid,” he emphasizes again and again – not of big pictures, of pathos and not of kitsch. One can still dream! “Only prison guards have something against escapism,” he once said. Just no “headline theater” that only illustrates moral content! No “theater of manuscripts” that always pours the same sauce over every subject! Instead, Hinrichs would like a “theater of encounter”. Not in the socio-pedagogical sense, no sitting area or integration breakfast, but an encounter with the possible and the impossible, with one’s own contradictions and abysses. It’s a big claim.
For the theater that Hinrichs dreams of, you need actors who dream with you. When Hinrichs says actors, he means personalities, not service providers. “Are you an artist or do you work in service?” That is the central question for actors in the 21st century, Hinrichs said in his speech for Claessens in 2018. Hinrichs wants the grand assertion, not the ironic complacency. He, the theater dreamer, wants more than Prussian disciplined craftsmen eager to deliver the director’s well-intentioned moral messages. “The Germans have always had a problem with freedom,” says Hinrichs. Also with aesthetic freedom.
If you want to take off together, you have to be able to rely on each other. “The only way to influence the future is to make promises and keep them,” Hinrichs quotes Hannah Arendt as saying. The joint rehearsals are a promise. As Hinrichs explains, there is no open conflict whatsoever. There is no indication for him that Claessens could leave the production and the entire evening is at stake.
But then Claessens gets out after the dress rehearsal one day before the premiere. Why? It remains a mystery for Hinrichs. He is not one of those director tyrants from which he himself suffered as an actor. He gives freedom, creates the line version together with the actors, he translated the text himself beforehand. That’s how he tells it. But the promise is not kept, and the ground is pulled out of the joint project. This Monday it is still a shock for Hinrichs.
aesthetics of the fragment
The Volksbühne does not comment on the exit, and Claessens cannot be reached for a statement either. Only on Instagram does he write that arguing with stupid people is like playing chess with a pigeon. The next post is a selfie with Stangenberg. Hinrichs, on the other hand, tries to save what can be saved. A cancellation is in the room, postponement is not possible. He decides to step in himself – an absurd turn of events as he wanted to avoid playing the lead role. When Hinrichs tells how many scenes and pictures were cut or shortened at the premiere, you begin to get a glimpse of the outlines of the evening that was looming in the rehearsals: a courageous, great evening of theater about the fascination of romanticism.
What you see at the premiere resembles ruins that tell of former greatness. You get an idea: you haven’t seen Stangenberg sitting at the Rewe checkout, full of melancholy and unfulfilled hope, since Christoph Marthaler at the Volksbühne. The soundtrack of the romantic revolt, the dream of the unity of art and life, ranges from Chopin and Mahler to rock and pop music of the late 20th century. Figures of mathematical beauty are danced in front of a stage set reminiscent of William Turner. And right in the middle of it all is Fabian Hinrichs with the libretto in one hand and the other gathering up his costume as he fights his way through the still impressive remnants of his evening as a sardanapal. Nevertheless, the gap cannot be overlooked: a kingdom for an actor!
“I don’t think it’s cool to be on stage with a libretto,” says Hinrichs. The large-scale attempt to bring the fascination of Romanticism to the stage involuntarily ends up with the epitome of Romanticism: the fragment. And Hinrichs at Sardanapal, who has to pay the price for his blind faith in art. Some of the reviews are devastating. It is said that Hinrichs failed as a director. If Claessens left for artistic reasons, one can understand that, writes the “taz” in a grotesque reversal of effect and cause. Hinrichs has read the reviews.
Nevertheless, you don’t see him sunk in resentment on this Monday morning. “I’m also full of doubts about myself,” he says. He wants to understand why this is – very romantic? – Couldn’t keep promise. He sees the reasons in contemporary culture, which only revolves around itself in a narcissistic manner. Who still makes promises? And transferred to the theater: who still dares to make big claims on stage? It’s easier here, too, to appear as a performer of yourself – with tons of irony if you have to. And the utopia? Stay on track. “I actually failed because of the present,” concludes Hinrichs.
In the evening he is on the stage, again with a libretto. For the second performance of “Sardanapal”, Hinrichs brought scenes back onto the stage that had been thrown out at the premiere. The evening is now an open fragment, matching the central sentence: “What are we looking for?” At the end there is standing applause for several minutes. Then Fabian Hinrichs writes another message with the sentence: “I’ve learned a lot.”
#Fabian #Hinrichs #failed #present