Im Psychohorroraltenheim
What else do the elders have to say?
Which: (c) Susanne Hassler-Smith
“Zwietalk” is a search for the lost happiness of the theatre. Peter Handke’s 80th birthday was celebrated in Vienna with theater stall magic, which the Nobel Prize winner had a hard time countering. And what is this Handke satire doing in the programme?
DUnsurprisingly, the grandmaster will not be present at the premiere. In the programme, too, the poet cultivates his reservations about the business: “You can publish the questions without answers.” No interview, nowhere. Instead only the words on the stage. “Just talk! Language, language!” it says in “Zwietalk”. At the end of the Peter Handke Festival Weeks in the German-language feuilleton on the occasion of the 80th birthday of the Nobel Prize winner in literature, Handke’s latest play was premiered in the Vienna Academy Theater.
Piece? Here one could already start arguing, because “Zwietalk” is a groping, erratic and introverted text. Are these two people who are in the eponymous dialogue here? Or is it a narrated self-contradiction, a self-interrupting monologue? A pleasure to read, the text is delicately stippled like an Impressionist painting. But on stage? The danger of wanting to give the text the right stage size through inflated pathos is obvious. Last autumn, the Burgtheater left “Zdeněk Adamec” to Frank Castorf, who was known as a piece smasher, it was a stroke of luck. Do you need someone who can counter Handke and his language?
In any case, it is not an easy task for the director Rieke Süsskow, who was born in 1990 and thus almost half a century after Handke, who is also celebrating her debut at the Burgtheater with the world premiere of “Zwietalk”. Her team includes younger generations for the stage, costumes and music: 1993, 1994 and 1996. The basic setting of the evening results from the life-world constellation: the dialogue takes place here between generations. What else do the elders have to say? These are Martin Schwab and Branko Samarovski, who were still born in the 1930s and state entities that have disappeared, as well as Hans Dieter Knebel, who has been an actor longer than Elisa Plüss and Maresi Riegner are even in the world.
Buy or rent?
The stage is divided into the kingdom of the old and the kingdom of the young, that of the dying and that of the burial. The balance of power between the areas is represented by the movable partition wall in the background, which leaves less and less space for the elderly, which the young people take up in return (stage: Mirjam Stängl). Surrounded by a group of youngsters with robust latex aprons that are guaranteed to be washable (costumes: Marlen Duken), the very old have to do a chair dance, accompanied by pop songs (music: Max Windisch-Spoerk). Whoever loses reappears on the other side as an urn.
It starts with a lot of pictures, but hardly any text. A visual counterweight to Handke before his language even makes it onto the stage. The psychohorror old people’s home is wonderfully choreographed, the Christoph Marthaler memory moments lined up like a string of pearls. Rarely is a word said about the lighting in reviews, on this evening that would simply be ignorant. What Marcus Loran does with the light is sensational. The leporello stage appears like transparent paper in turquoise, then dipped in strong golden yellow like heavy fabric. A great theater booth magic!
Where does stage magic come from – and where is it going? Handke’s text is a search for the lost happiness of the theater that leads to the layers of earliest childhood: the children’s theater that makes the imagination run wild, the overheard flirtation in the barn hayloft that tickles Eros, and the murderer’s house, that of the uncanny announces. “Life has appeared. As it could only appear on the theater. The living word.” Handke, the great romantic, wants to dive to the bottom of human experience in order to recover what is undisguised and alive. This is paid for by retreating into the almost lyrical.
The pretty counterpart can be found in the programme, although it has a lyrical touch, but is unmistakably prosaic in content: “You may know it. This one topic. And the dialogue with yourself: should I buy or rent. Would you rather wait or wait? In times like this. What is my stomach saying? What does my bank say? What does the market say?” The Handke satire is an advertisement by JP Immobilien. Next door, vergissmeinnicht.at advertises the legacy of culture, you can support the Burgtheater financially after your own death. In view of this, one might consider Handke’s anti-present project to be in vain. The world from which one attempts to flee in literature returns, even in the most elegiac twist.
Toward the end, the limits of Süsskow’s directing become clear. Handke’s language is finding it increasingly difficult to assert itself against the concept of staging. That’s still pretty to look at. But is the thread of conversation between the generations breaking? The search for “holy times in the theatre”, which Handke is talking about, is probably the source of his furious, temple-cleansing “audience insult” from 1966. The poet stays with his subject through all the changing circumstances of the time. In its quiet tones, “Zwietalk” is a large text that no longer knows where it is. On stage? Even after the premiere, that cannot be said with certainty.