2024-04-15 14:57:21
Most of the atrocities committed to gain power usually remain hidden. Not on the theater stage, where the path to the top – see “Macbeth” and other plays – is laid out. With “The Great Gopnik” Viktor Yerofeev has added a new one to these ruler dramas. The author, who fled from Russia, created a stage adaptation of his 600-page novel, which has now premiered at the Freiburg Theater.
As in the novel, it is easy to see in the play that the Great Gopnik – a “Gopnik” in Russian is something like a back-alley crook – means Vladimir Putin. From the KGB, Putin went through the city administration of St. Petersburg to the office of Prime Minister and President of the Russian Federation. He is called “The Killer in the Kremlin” or “The Man Without a Face,” to name just two titles from the mass of popular Putin non-fiction books that are hard to keep track of.
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Yerofeev’s play also thrives on the uncanny fascination of tyrannical rule. Roughly simplified, there are two ways in the theater to deal with such an aura of power. The first functions as in Shakespeare’s Richard III, where the attraction of evil is experienced through the audience’s alliance with the protagonist. Brecht demonstrated the second when he dared to disenchant himself through the power of analytical drama with “The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui”.
Neither Shakespeare nor Brecht
Is Yerofeyev’s piece more like “Vlady III” or the “stoppable rise of Vladimir Pui”? Neither nor. “The Great Gopnik” avoids the depths of mass psychology and political economy. So Martin Hohner, always meticulously dressed in a suit, remains as the Great Gopnik between “Killer in the Kremlin” and “Man without a Face”, a barely comprehensible being without the impressive mental physiognomy of a Shakespearean hero or the analytical depth of a Brecht figure.
Yerofeyev’s approach is a wild mix of fantasy and realism. But after almost three hours with a break, one is still puzzling over what constitutes Putin and Putinism. Is the Great Gopnik a hooligan, an anarchist fucker? Or maybe a clever power politician, the embodiment of a Russian Bonapartism after the Yeltsin disaster of “shock therapy”? Does Putin have “no ideology,” as it is said at one point, or does he carry ideological baggage from Dostoyevsky to Dugin?
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As a way out of the indecisiveness of his approach, Yerofeyev takes refuge in the archetypal. During a sauna session, the Great Gopnik chats up Stalin, played by Holger Kunkel, whose penis hangs to the floor under the towel. Not only does the imagery used by Eike Weinreich’s director at this point not contain subtle nuances, the video clips with Putin demons between burning houses also do not skimp on clear interpretations for the audience.
Putin as a revenant of Stalin? “Russia is a carousel,” it says at one point like a mnemonic. Tsar Ivan, Stalin or Putin, the personnel change like the eras, but the carousel remains an unchanging, almost metaphysical Russia. History as an eternal return of the same, in which the timeless Russian soul is realized in great men? This model of history somewhere between Nietzsche and CG Jung seems a bit outdated in many respects.
Jana Horstmann reveals access to the Russian unconscious as Sister O., who is temporarily dressed by the costume designer Bianca Deigner in a similar genital outfit to that of Stalin in the sauna. According to Sister O., pornography proves to be a deep insight into the apparently deeply rooted desire for cruelty. Such psycho-pornographic explanations for national peculiarities are not really convincing because they are only proclaimed on stage.
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Set designer Bettina Meyer translates the historical carousel metaphor into a revolving stage, which on the one hand shows the base with the boots of a monumental Stalin statue; the back of the “personality cult” is the back yard of crooks and violence. There are also two other rooms: the magnificent reception room with a desk is the center of political power, and a salon with an ancestral gallery represents culture. At the end the curtain opens that separates them both. Power and culture are connected.
Memories of Boris Nemtsov
Against the backdrop of the war in Ukraine, Yerofeyev asks whether there is an innocent Russian culture. His answer must be taken as a clear no. “It is never a document of culture without being at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, expanding the context of culture’s guilt beyond national borders. Yerofejew stays in Russian, and through the author’s character played by Thieß Brammer, he also makes his own involvement the subject.
“The Great Gopnik” is an evening that aims to bring a lot of messages to the audience. The rise of the Great Gopnik is told in individual stages, from the support of the liberals and oligarchs (“we have him under control”) to the elimination of former allies and now opposition members (based on the fall of Boris Nemtsov) to the suppression of mass protests from 2012. The focus on the ruler figure has its pitfalls: In order to explain the rise in the rubble of the Soviet empire, social behavior and laws would have to come to the stage more than the individual ones.
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Although people and events can be recognized and a best-of of well-known Putin quotes appears, the material does not add up to a dramatic event. The excursions into historical metaphysics, pornography and cultural theory, on the other hand, offer a diffuse panorama of the supra-historical. So eat, Ivan? This is applauded, but has little insight. Even a bitter tirade about the “epidemic of stupidity” suffers from the fact that you don’t know where it came from – a laboratory accident? Zoonosis? – she is coming.
At the end, “The Great Gopnik” also wants to issue a warning. “And I’ll get you, Europe, too,” says the stage Putin. “Goodbye, Europe. The world will never be the same as it once was.” After the final applause, Yerofeev said a few words to the audience. He wrote a piece about all of us, not just about Russia. But neither the claim to make what is happening in Russia clear nor to create a universal parable has been fulfilled here.
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