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Protagonists Trump, Biden in the TV duel in Cleveland: One Shakespeare, the other Ibsen
Photo: Kevin Dietsch / Pool via CNP / MediaPunch / imago images / MediaPunch
Perhaps it should have been done like the Elizabethan theater in London more than 400 years ago.
At that time, the protagonists were supposedly allowed to fight fencing matches before the performance, so that they would start fiery on stage when the curtain rose.
The heroic actors in the first election campaign duel for the job of the American president trudged stiffly and visibly uneasy in their two bright blue lecterns.
As if Joe Biden and Donald Trump had each practiced their text all alone in the cloakroom until shortly before the performance.
Only after a few minutes in the first TV duel between the two US presidential candidates did their tongues and bodies loosen.
The beefier of the two stage heroes parted the air with his outstretched right hand, as if the object were to chop up every argument of the adversary.
The white-haired, slimmer opponent, on the other hand, limited his motor skills to waving his outstretched index finger.
Both looked hectic and by no means confident.
Head first
The basic requirement for a successful theater production, however, goes an old rule of criticism, is that the director manages to thoroughly drive out any fidgeting of the actors with hands and legs during the rehearsal work.
A good actor, as the director George Tabori once said about the great Gert Voss, has to throw himself into the idea "like a wild bull that has broken out of the cage".
So not with flapping limbs, but with the skull first.
The audience at the "Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump" premiere actually wanted to see some blood in the Cleveland University auditorium and in front of the television screens on Tuesday evening.
It wasn't waiting so much for what the two main characters in the drama had to say, but for small mishaps, sweats, tripping or even fainting.
It's just like in the theater, whose much-conjured live character pulls the audience under its spell especially when something really goes wrong on stage.
When the heroes up there accidentally cut themselves with swords or plop down gasping from the ramp.
It can be said that the performance turned out to be harrowing uneventful in this regard.
Well, Trump's face flushed in the course of the staging, while his challenger Biden still seemed a little paler the more often the President interrupted him.
The fact that there was still no real tension is due to the fact that the two stage actors performed according to directions from different eras.
Trump sought eye contact with his teammate in the manner of psychological realism, as was once the case with Gustaf Gründgens, while Biden always spoke directly to the audience, as in the modern, anti-illusionist director's theater by Frank Castorf and his colleagues.
Is the sympathy bonus enough for the final applause?
In fact, the two didn't even play the same piece.
Trump is a character that Shakespeare could have made up, unfortunately Biden is only from a play by Ibsen, as the director Leander Haussmann had expertly instructed me on the evening before the duel.
In fact, the angry aside, the wandering praising of one's own merits and the consistent twisting of even the most obvious facts, which Trump also practiced virtuously on this evening, like from Shakespeare's maddened drama "Richard III."
borrowed.
Joe Biden's intelligent, fact-based argumentation follows the temperament of the spa doctors and builders from Ibsen's dramas.
Biden faltered a few times and probably involuntarily reminded many of his listeners that he had trouble speaking fluently at a young age.
But will this sympathy bonus really give him the big final applause?
I am skeptical about that.
For Biden's plight and his courage to show weakness, what the playwright Ibsen said about victorious heroes should apply: "A vulnerable heel does not make an Achilles."
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