Berlin is getting a new “Threepenny Opera”.
Barrie Kosky directs the play by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill for the Berliner Ensemble.
Nico Holonics is his Mackie knife.
The actor began his career at the Munich Volkstheater.
On August 13, 2021, the new “Threepenny Opera” will premiere at the Berliner Ensemble.
Barrie Kosky directs the play by Bert Brecht and Kurt Weill.
Nico Holonics is Berlin's new Mackie knife.
The peak of triumph?
The man is 37. From this Friday, August 13th, he will be Berlin's new, young Mackie Messer.
And that at the old Brecht Theater, the famous Berliner Ensemble, that house on Schiffbauerdamm, where “The Threepenny Opera” was premiered on August 31, 1928;
with Harald Paulsen as Macheath.
Countless actors around the world have since left their mark on this nefarious gangster and gallant.
And now Nico Holonics does so in Barrie Kosky's production.
Holonics came to the Munich Volkstheater in 2007
Has it made it to the top of the role repertoire?
Probably not, because Holonics was involved right from the start.
That was in Munich when Christian Stückl engaged the graduate of the Berlin Ernst Busch Drama School at the Volkstheater in 2007 and with a sure eye for the extraordinary talent of the debutant, he gave him Schiller's Don Karlos and, soon after, Shakespeare's Richard III.
entrusted.
That could only go well.
Three years at the Volkstheater, three years at the Münchner Kammerspiele, after six years in the Bavarian metropolis it was time to look around artistically.
After the Volkstheater, Holonics played at the Münchner Kammerspiele
“It was really lucky that I was entrusted with big roles so quickly in Munich that I was allowed to play very big,” recalls Nico Holonics in an interview. He knows that starting a career like this is not a given. As a rule, beginners tend to be in the third or fourth row. He left Munich with a "heavy heart". He had lived in Thalkirchen, where it was so beautiful, where he had felt comfortable in the nearby nature, the Isar floodplain. “But I also wanted to see something else.” Oliver Reese, then artistic director in Frankfurt am Main, came at just the right time. Holonics: “He attracted me with the density of the great directors who worked on his house, Stephan Kimmig, Karin Henkel, Amélie Niermeyer, Andreas Kriegenburg, Michael Thalheimer, Falk Richter, Stefan Pucher.In retrospect, I have to say: It was the right decision. "
In 2017 Holonics came to the Berliner Ensemble with director Oliver Reese
When Reese took over the management of the Berliner Ensemble (BE) in 2017, it was a matter of course that Nico Holonics would follow him to Berlin and immediately present himself to the Berliners in the opening premiere of Brecht's “Caucasian Chalk Circle” in the role of soldier Simon Chachawa.
He has met them in many performances since then, for example as Oskar Matzerath in the one-person perennial favorite of the stage version of Grass' "Tin Drum".
So now “The Threepenny Opera”. The constant rapid change between acting and opera, speaking and singing is extremely demanding. Holonics has never played anything like it. But as a child and adolescent he sang in the Leipzig Gewandhaus children's choir, where he met conductors such as Kurt Masur, Herbert Blomstedt and Giuseppe Sinopoli. Will he benefit from it today? “At the age of nine you don't always find choral symphonies - and that is what it was all about - not always beautiful. It was all terribly strict, hours of rehearsals on three or four afternoons a week, discipline and order prevailed. Only now, in retrospect, do I know what I took with me, namely the realization of how beautiful and how exhausting it is sometimes to make art. An experience that helps me today to get over so many difficulties; because i knowthat it is worth tormenting yourself. As far as the musical side is concerned, I am of course very well educated by the choir. "
Nico Holonics really wanted to work with director Barrie Kosky
Nevertheless, it is now a huge change for him as an actor suddenly to have an orchestra as a partner that disciplines you in a completely different way.
And also a director of the music theater.
For Holonics reason to rave: “Kosky creates a rehearsal climate that is simply wonderful, because it gives you the feeling of being totally free.
I hadn't known him before, but had seen his 'Carmen' at the Frankfurt Opera in 2016, which impressed me very much.
And when I heard that he was going to direct 'Die Dreigroschenoper' at the BE, I went to the artistic director: I want to play there, no matter what role. ”A little later, Holonics was asked on the rehearsal stage to audition Kosky - and it was Macheath him sure.
Holonics: “It's an enormous task. The hardest are three things: the precision in the musical, the fucked up in the role and the lightness in the acting. To be brutal and at the same time light - that is the challenge. ”Of course he knows from other Mackie actors, from famous greats of the past. But whoever was before him, he doesn't let that affect him: “I wasn't the first to have Richard III. played. And I won't be the last Mackie knife either. Present is now. Now is 2021. This is our time. "
