The Hunting License Society
The General (Michael Wittenborn) and the hunting party
Source: Matthew Horn
At the Schauspielhaus with his Theater der Groteske, director Herbert Fritsch transforms the modern classic “Die Jagdgesellschaft” by Thomas Bernhard into an insanely funny evening with a brilliant ensemble led by Michael Wittenborn, Angelika Richter and Bastian Reiber
Et was quite a risk that director Herbert Fritsch took. “Die Jagdgesellschaft” by Thomas Bernhard, a classic study from 1974 on the subject of love, literature, illness unto death and music, is not necessarily designed as a comedy in the style of the Commedia d’ell Arte. The play is usually played like a naturalistic tragedy, a bourgeois tragedy, the main characters are supplemented by a number of extras as ministers – since these state guests of the hunting party are only present as an audience for the general and do not get a chance to speak anyway. From this hunting party, which fetches one or the other pheasant from the stage sky, Fritsch turns it into a hunting license party in a double sense, a crazy troupe with a license to kill.
The ridiculousness of power in garish, striking costumes
But the concept with which Fritsch works the comedy out of the play, which is inherent in a classic Chekhovian setting, is a stunner. It’s big and flashy. The stage design shows a huge, perspectivally distorted hut with monster armchairs in front of an even more monstrous boller stove, on which one or the other thoroughly burns his hand because it invites you to lean against it (stage: Herbert Fritsch). The striking costumes and hairstyles (Cosima Wanda Winter) stylize and caricature beyond measure. The hunting party consists of a horde of Cossacks with beards in skins. A Japanese prince (Sachiko Hara) and a Japanese princess (Charlie Casanova) make their way through the snow and events in classic historical costumes.
The writer (Bastian Reiber) and the general (Angelika Richter) play cards, watched by the cook (Bettina Stucky)
Source: Matthew Horn
The actors show off with all sorts of pantomime and glaring exaggerations. The card game with which medically trained writers and the general pass the time and at the same time kill time is played virtuously by Angelika Richter as the general and Bastian Reiber as the writer – completely without cards. Richter screams through the night. In desperation, Reiber trawls through it, restless, keenly aware of his own powerlessness in the face of the general’s immense wealth. The guns of the hunting party not only go off when the venison is shot, but occasionally also accidentally and let the plaster trickle onto the stage through holes in the ceiling. The huge furnace exhaust pipe also turns out to be not quite as stable as expected.
Michael Wittenborg carries the evening with his parody
Michael Wittenborn as a terminally ill general who boasts the remains of his analytical mind is the tragicomic character of the evening, a silly King Lear with long, stringy white hair who has lost his power. He mocks the writer, the theater, the comedy as “Operedde”, he looks calmly at his operation, which he seems to regard as a small intervention, he who lost an arm in Stalingrad. The prosthesis kept slipping off the all too slippery armrest. The general also tries to hide from him the fact that his large forest has been completely gnawed by the bark beetle, and has erected “a wall of silence” around him.
But the general who has fought many a battle, who has fallen out of favor with the government, cannot be deceived. It is true that this time he does not shoot himself in the playhouse, as Bernhard intended, but he throws himself into the furnace gorge, like a witch who is no longer needed in the continuation of politics by other means. The stage music, which theatrically illustrates the entire evening like film music, is performed live on stage by the fantastic pianist Ingo Günter. Jonas Hien spreads pure joy around the general and the writer as the woodworker Asamer, struggling for words, because the ax lies loosely in his hands, sometimes intentionally, sometimes accidentally. Bettina Stucky has chic appearances as cook Anna Sasha Rau, Eva Bühnen and Daniel Hoevels give the crass ministers.
“The Hunting Society” by Thomas Bernhardt, Deutsches Schauspielhaus, further dates on April 9, 15 and 23 and on May 5 and 21