There is an outrageous case of Old-Torment reporting. On the stage of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin you can see two elderly gentlemen whose bodies are stuck in crumpled nightgowns, and how they are pushed around in rolling hospital beds - and a young woman in high-heeled shoes keeps on coming up and throws herself up with full force one of the two patients.
The two old people, played by the actors Markwart Müller-Elmau and Michael Gerber, are shoved, kissed and shaken like puppets. But they can not complain about their fate: their mouths, which are apparently paralyzed by strokes, are almost nothing but babble and sighs.
"Lear after William Shakespeare" is the name of the opening event of the new season at the Deutsches Theater. On the clinically bright stage stands a windmill, perhaps because the senile King Lear, who thoroughly disowned his three daughters Goneril, Regan and Cordelia when he inherited his kingdom, somehow recalls the dull windmill warrior Don Quixote.
The actress Natali Seelig plays one of the daughters in a red tube dress with skeleton print, the actresses Birgit Unterweger and Linda Pöppel stamp the other two sisters as black-robed wrath goddesses on the stage. The harassed grandpa in the rollaway beds can be identified as Lear and his loyalist Count Gloucester. And because a bit of Shakespearean text is supposed to be, instead of the dumb old woman, the actress Pöppel roars a few verses of old Lear, while her colleague Selig jokes in a very enigmatic way about "alcohol, marijuana, ecstasy".
Schwadronier evening about inheriting and dying
Welcome to the emphatically intoxicating world of director and stage designer Sebastian Hartmann, who brags in the program booklet that he is not a man, "staged in the traditional sense" and "makes texts playable". Not a "modernization of King Lear" is his goal, but "topic management" and "the traceability of a problem". In the case of the "Lear" this should be obvious: The spectators are invited to a casual Schwadronier evening about inheriting and dying - in the wafted from the beginning fog over the stage, as if it were about a necromancy.
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German Theater: "King Lear"In fact, the 51-year-old director Hartmann is something of the last delirious of the German-speaking city theater and therefore for some theater lovers a harbinger of hope. He once learned his craft from Frank Castorf's Berlin Volksbühne and cast an eye over Castorf's rejection of psychology, whose fun at fragmenting and its art of inciting actresses and actresses to wild outbursts.
Since then, Hartmann has developed his own techniques of noise evocation and iconoclasm. Last year, he received with the Dresden performance of "humiliated and insulted" after Fjodor Dostojewski and the Berlin production of "Hunger / Peer Gynt" by Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen two spectacular theatrical magic, in which the performers on an open stage on huge canvases paintings made by artist Tilo Baumgärtel.
The furor and poetic charm of these recent successful Hartmann works is unfortunately not noticeable in the "Lear" seance in the Deutsches Theater. For almost two hours there is pathetic stasis in the Sterbehospizsaal under the stage windmill. Sometimes a bit of sword-fighting is fought in the background and in indistinct film projections of war and space exploration and environmental destruction are reported because the ancients are supposedly to blame for the broken state of the world. Time is beaten on the hospital beds and jeered with the old men.
Roar like in the eighties
In general, the audience is roared in this production, as it is actually out of fashion since the eighties in the German-speaking city theater. Hartmann justifies this in the program booklet, among other things, by the fact that artists and spectators in the auditorium should reflect together on painfully topical catastrophes: "the ecological collapse, the extermination of our livelihoods".
To suffer at this theater evening rather the eradication of all discursive bases. It is a remarkably self-indulgent lack of stimulus and intellectual laziness that characterizes this "Lear" meditation. Perhaps also Hartmann and his dramaturge Claus Caesar have noticed this at some point in the rehearsal, at least they leave at some point and soundless from Shakespeare's old king and send the actress Cordelia ways to the stage ramp, so that they have a highly topical piece text of the acclaimed playwright Wolfram Lotz recites. The work has only a long way to do with the "Lear" and is called "The Politicians".
"Die Politiker" is a long poem that consists of many repetitions and verbalities. Under the sun-yellow-shining windmill, the actress Wege takes new approaches over and over again to refine the generally commonplace chatter about our allegedly depraved and perhaps benign political actors to a lyrical Suada. The work of the highly acclaimed 38-year-old author Lotz is a ravishing joke and a virtuoso Dada art exercise. Unlike the "Lear" is laughed at "Die Politiker" and the performer ways in the German Theater extensively and cheered.
Nevertheless, this season opening night can not lie all in all. Because in the dramaturgical basic principle, the poem of the writer Lotz is quite similar to the staging of the director Hartmann. There is much to be said in both events: important and unimportant, beautiful and cruel, questionable and stupid. Unfortunately, said in both cases - actually nothing.
"Lear / The politicians" . Deutsches Theater Berlin, upcoming performances on the 8th, 13th, 24th and 27th of September