The Münchner Kammerspiele have commissioned a new piece from author Thomas Köck.
Now his drama "Your palaces are empty (all we ever wanted)" was premiered in the theater.
Our premiere review:
Teiresias.
The apparent paradox of the blind seer is as famous as it is touching.
Since Homer and beyond Dante, his blindness has always been a punishment, his seeing a gift.
But: how much power does the foresee carry - and how much responsibility?
This is the question posed by a celebrated voice in young German-speaking contemporary theater.
The 35-year-old, two-time Mülheim drama award winner Thomas Köck campaigns in his texts for “this infinitely beautiful world”, “which is being burned before our eyes for the eternally same story of exploitation, destruction, profit maximization”.
Münchner Kammerspiele commissioned “Your palaces are empty”
His drama "Your palaces are empty (all we ever wanted)" now premiered as a commissioned work by the Münchner Kammerspiele.
A happy symbiosis, as this world premiere bears the signature of in-house director Jan-Christoph Gockel, which seems almost a guarantee for emotional stage revelations in the interplay of doll and person. On top of that, Michael Pietsch Köck's passion for the "doctrine of visitation" of the British hauntologist Mark Fisher finds the perfect corporeality in the animated marionettes. The term, coined by Derrida in 1993, understands “the ghosts of other epochs” as “echoes of our future”, an uncanny premonition of the future dead in the self-destructive Anthropocene: “aug in aug / with violence / all glory leaves you”. Not only in the Amazon, where in 1550 secular and ecclesiastical conquistadors embody the cruelest guilty of colonization in the urge for the legendary Eldorado. Not only in the USA today,where the fatal abuse of opioid pain killers claims hundreds of thousands of victims. In poetic abandonment, in dramatic role play or flooding interviews, most recently in a choral interwoven triad across places and times, Köck describes a world that is in the process of exploitation, extinction, and dissolution “in the final stages”.
“Your palaces are empty” at the Kammerspiele captivates with its imagination
The staging in the Schauspielhaus responds with an abundance of imagination, a lot of respect and a bow to the musicality of the text. In a dystopian reflection of the auditorium as an empty palace ruin, Julia Kurzweg (stage), Janina Brinkmann (costumes), Anton Berman and Maria Moling (live music) give the melancholy, powerful tone of decayed, faded, abandoned splendor. Whether in a heavy brocade coat and VW Golf into the past, in bright red latex and redeemer fanaticism under the bright yellow fast food chain logo or in pseudo-intellectual cigarette smoke in a 1970s talk parody - as expressive actors, listeners and thread players follow Bernardo Arias Porras, Katharina Bach, Christian Löber, Nancy Mensah-Offei,Michael Pietsch and Leoni Schulz the daring, lighthearted to sarcastically angry variations of Dante's stations of Hell, Purgatory and Paradise. "All we ever wanted": This long applauded evening shows that timelessness becomes a curse through excess. But also: Willing and theater are inherently inseparable.
Teresa Grenzmann
Here you can read our review of the world premiere of “Effingers”, with which the Münchner Kammerspiele enters the current season.