“Los Años / The Years” at the Kammerspiele: Where have all the years gone?

The Münchner Kammerspiele show “Los Años / The Years” by Mariano Pensotti.

It's a touching evening.

Our premiere review:

Often things go badly in the pants when the theater tries to use the narrative methods of the film.

Not here.

Often a production also boggles the bittersweet clichés when it speaks of the everyday.

Not here.

The Münchner Kammerspiele show - in collaboration with the Ruhrtriennale, the Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), the Künstlerhaus Mousonturm (Frankfurt / Main) and the Complejo Teatral de Buenos Aires - “Los Años / The Years” by Mariano Pensotti.

On Friday was the premiere of the 105-minute long evening, which was well worth seeing.

“Los Años / The Years” plays on two time levels

The Argentine author and director shows with his Grupo Marea two episodes from the life of the filmmaker Manuel.

He is shortly before his 60th birthday in 2050, is returning home and trying to connect where the course for his life path was set in 2020.

The birth of his daughter, the separation from his wife, and - most importantly for Manuel at the time: his success with a documentary about Raúl, a boy from the poor district of Buenos Aires.

“Los Años / The Years” uses a kind of “split screen” like in the cinema

Mariana Tirantte built Manuel's apartment twice in the Schauspielhaus - on the left in 2020, on the right three decades later. Both are played simultaneously. This is reminiscent of the so-called split screen, as we know it from the cinema or from ambitious television productions. Switching between both time levels on stage - and not by editing in the studio - is a challenge for the ensemble. It works impressively easily: Bernardo Arias Porras, Mara Orderi, Paco Gorriz, Bárbara Masso, Marcelo Subiotto and Diego Vainer actually jump effortlessly back and forth between the years and their characters. Supported by precise lighting, this creates an organic narrative flow that one follows with fascination. The subtitles (German / English) are also cleverly integrated into the scenes,that even those who do not speak Spanish have no problems understanding.

“Los Años / The Years” is a convincing ensemble performance

“Los Años / The Years” is of course not just a search for traces in Manuel's personal history.

The text, which doesn't even need the few gags about Corona and the way of life of the present, is rather a reflection on the time - and the question of what ultimately constitutes a biography.

Because not only Manuel and the people around him have aged by 30 years, his ideas, dreams, visions and longings have also been severely gnawed by the time.

The only thing left is usually: disillusionment.

As an old man, it is not enough to put on the T-shirt from back then to revive the ambitions of yesteryear.

Rousing applause for "Los Años / The Years"

It could all be terribly melancholy and depressing.

But Grupo Marea unfolds this career with great ease, with sympathy for the characters and with a good dose of humor.

“Then the Egyptians invented the years”, it is once said, “and since then nothing has been as it was”.

Possible, but ultimately - and this is shown by the staging with incidental poetry - it is up to us how we use the time.

This evening of the theater, the narrator remarks at the end, is nothing more than a “recitation with piano accompaniment”.

Might be.

But above all, it is life itself that we saw there.

Thunderous applause.

Read our review of “Effingers”, the season opening at the Münchner Kammerspiele, here.