“Everyman” premiere at the Salzburg Festival: with Lars Eidinger in the title role, Verena Altenberger as fanatics and a strong ensemble, director Michael Sturminger succeeds in producing a convincing production.
Our premiere review:
The Salzburg Festival started with “Jedermann”.
Lars Eidinger can be seen in the title role for the first time - Verena Altenberger is convincing as a fanatic.
After the premiere on Saturday, there were cheers and standing ovations for the new production.
It's a farewell without words.
What remains to be said when everything is evident in bitter clarity?
Everyone dies for himself alone.
The sadness and the enormous pain that lies in this fact do not require a conversation - Lars Eidinger and Verena Altenberger show in a touching choreography what the death of a loved one means.
Lars Eidinger and Verena Altenberger are the powerhouse of the staging
Everyone and their passion dance around and desire one another, wrestle and fight with one another.
Do one another good and hurt one another.
A game of attraction and repulsion.
A dance of death that shows how important these two people are for each other - and that it is almost unbearable that where he has to go she doesn't want to go.
Eidinger pushed his colleague to the edge of the stage platform, pulled it - then she lets go of his hand and goes out through the auditorium.
It is the strongest, because it is the truest scene in a strong and true staging.
Sturminger kicked his old "Jedermann" in the bin - a good thing
Michael Sturminger kicked his bland "Jedermann" in the bin, which he set up for the first time in 2017 for the Salzburg Festival and which has since been seen - adapted to the respective cast.
You don't have to cry for what has been disposed of, although there was also something convincing here, for example Mavie Hörbiger as works.
But now Sturminger, his new leading actor Lars Eidinger and his new fanatics Verena Altenberger have succeeded in gaining convincing access to this piece of Salzburg DNA. The new production had its premiere on Saturday - due to the weather in the Großer Festspielhaus instead of on the Domplatz. The audience justifiably celebrated the two-hour evening with loud applause and standing ovations.
The production succeeds in releasing Hugo von Hofmannsthal's “Game of the Dying of the Rich Man” from the burden of myth.
Lars Eidinger played a major role in this.
The actor from the Berlin Schaubühne pulls the festival's over-the-top figure down from the pedestal and stripped her soul.
When everyone realizes the inevitability of death, Eidinger stumbles across the stage, howls, naked except for his underpants, snot and water - and shows: a bunch of people in dire need.
So succinct, but also so understandable.
Verena Altenberger is an important, strong partner for Eidinger
In Verena Altenberger he has a strong and important partner.
The two succeed in what has always been the claim between Jedermann and Buhlschaft in the recent past: They show a couple who love each other - and in which each part is nevertheless aware of its own worth.
Altenberger and Eidinger act with great care for each other, regardless of their intensity - this togetherness increases the height of the fall.
In order to work out the relationship between the two characters even more clearly, Sturminger and dramaturge Angela Obst allowed themselves one of the few interventions in Hofmannsthal's text.
The figure of the cook, whom everyone entrusts with the feast, has been deleted: Now she orders the feast, while he asks the cook, in the words of the cook, whether he should prepare every course fresh.
Edith Clever and Mavie Hörbiger are convincing in their roles
There are many roles around the Eidinger / Altenberger Center.
Edith Clever, everyone's mother until 2020, now plays a severe but noble death.
Towards the end, it becomes more and more caring - a comforting thought that culminates in the final image, in which Clever and Eidinger group together to form a pietà.
Mavie Hörbiger shows God with a wink as an old, white man, based on the narrator of the animated series “Once upon a time there was life”.
Later, as the devil full of words and deception, she will try to lead everyone off the right path.
In addition, she comes from the auditorium onto the stage: Isn't there a little devil in each of us?
+
Tricky: The devilishly good Mavie Hörbiger in the new Salzburg “Jedermann” (in the background: Kathleen Morgeneyer as Faith).
© Matthias Horn / Salzburg Festival
With such details, and there are some of them, the staging docks with today.
Everyone uses the conversation with the poor neighbor as an excursus about the top and bottom in society: “There must be more downstairs than upstairs, otherwise the swing won't hold.” The dispute with the guilty servant then takes place in the boxing ring.
This is wonderful slapstick (with the exact background music and noise of Ensemble 21) - but it also makes it clear that even everyone has to fight for their place.
Lars Eidinger sings Brecht on the Path of Repentance
As he sets out on the path of knowledge, Eidinger sings the morning chorale of Peachum from Brecht's “Threepenny Opera”: “Wake up, you rotten Christian!
Get on with your sinful life, show what a villain you are, the Lord will then give it to you. ”So it happens - when everyone does not expect it, is completely unfinished.
The towers with which Renate Martin and Andreas Donhauser delimit the stage also tell of this.
Only the skeletons are standing, otherwise they are unfinished like everyone's existence.
Ultimately, one wish remains above all: Long live this "everyone".