Enlarge image
Scoundrel without remorse: actor Ulrich Matthes (standing) as village judge Adam in the Deutsches Theater, actress Lorena Handschin (seated 5th from right) as judge Walter
Photo: Arno Declair
When the light is turned on, the audience looks at a convict.
Astonished, irritated laughter can be heard in the theater.
The orange-colored undershirt is speckled, the skull shaved and full of bloody cracks, the feet in torn socks, that's how the actor Ulrich Matthes sits in a long row of chairs in a waiting room.
This guy looks like a bazooka in a comic, the decal of a villain.
And while a friendly and neatly dressed young man (Jeremy Mockridge) is persuading him, he seems to be slowly realizing himself that he should not appear as a defendant on this day, but as a judge in a beautiful village in the Netherlands.
"Everything is colorful around the corner / Isn't court day today too?" Says the judge Adam in Heinrich von Kleist's comedy "The Broken Jug" from 1811. The play tells about an abuser.
The old village tyrant Adam, who judged the disputes of his fellow men in a small town called Huisum, tried to blackmail the girl Eve into sex.
He broke into her room under a pretext and, when he attacked the young woman, chased away and beaten up by her fiancé Ruprecht, was not recognized in the dark.
The perpetrator is looked at with ice-cold mockery and real amusement
The next day, a court ruling on the destruction of the jug, which he himself smashed in his attack and escape, is to be decided - and Adam wants to pass the blame on to someone else. That he fails is solely thanks to the surprise visit of the judge Walter, who controls the judge and convicts him as a criminal. "What makes Kleist's drama a comedy is above all the audacity with which the patriarchy exercises power and cement conditions," says the program booklet of the Deutsches Theater.
In Anne Lenk's staging of the "broken jug", the figure of the investigator Walter is remodeled into a woman. She is played by the young actress Lorena Handschin. Your judge Walter wears a blonde potted haircut and a sunny smile on her face. The pregnancy belly that bulges under Ms. Walter's dungarees could, from the perspective of old white men, signal that hardness and relentlessness are not to be expected from this woman.
Of course, the opposite turns out to be correct.
Handschin's court advisor looks at Matthes' judge Adam and his breach of the law with ice-cold mockery and real amusement.
When he is about to fill it with wine, she toasts it with him and, as soon as he looks away, pours the stuff carelessly on the floor.
She laughs at him, almost fascinated by the backwardness and stupidity that she encounters here.
At the premiere on Saturday evening, the politicians Angela Merkel and Monika Grütters, who have just been released from office, are sitting in one of the front rows of the parquet floor of the German Theater.
You are watching a feminist comedy.
And, that is perhaps the highlight of the evening, a completely outrageous performance.
The director Anne Lenk was in her early 40s and has attracted attention in recent years with some outstanding productions, including a "Maria Stuart" in Berlin and a "Phaedra" in Nuremberg.
She is rightly praised for the accuracy of her view of literary texts and her clear, patient work with actors.
"With me there are no coincidences, everything is set and managed," said Lenk in an interview.
“And although I work with foreign materials, the truth is that I tell a lot about myself. If I could write, I would write, but I can't.
That's why I work with texts that famous men have written and try to find my peace with them. "
Not even at the moment of unmasking does the judge become terrified
In the case of the author Kleist and the classic comedy "The Broken Krug", Lenk succeeds in a cleverly balanced, often shamelessly comical, ninety-minute feat. It's a celebration of the wonderfully twisted Kleistian language, sometimes just gorgeous nonsense. As if following the football fan anthem "Hup, Holland, hup!", The costume designer Sibylle Wallum has put all the women and men on stage in orange clothes and pseudo-traditional costumes. The waiting room stage (Judith Oswald) is dominated by a huge still life painting from the mid-seventeenth century, which shows ham, oysters and grapes as well as a parrot.
In many "Krug" productions, the judge Adam is a dark, dangerous ore villain. In a famous version of the Kleist play developed by Peter Stein, the actor Klaus Maria Brandauer raged in the title role from 2008 to 2017 in the Berliner Ensemble as a grandiose berserk, while twelve real chickens were jumping around on the stage.
The village judge Adam of the actor Matthes, on the other hand, is a deeply relaxed, soft, and often stoned grinning unteachable man. This guy has been used to getting away with his lies anytime, anywhere, for so long that he doesn't even get any horror at the moment of the final exposure. One can also say: He is not a somehow interesting perpetrator, but a closed case, a joke. This is one of the reasons why the women who accuse him are dressed up as jokers in the manner of the Commedia dell 'Arte. Eve (Lisa Hrdina) has put on buck teeth. Her mother Marthe (Franziska Machens) is squeezed into a funny tube skirt. The neighbor Brigitte (Julia Windischbauer) wears a clown nose on her face.
It's a bright orange party presented by the director Lenk, a triumphant session over the #MeToo villain Adam, who has to be brought to justice.
The light goes out between the scenes, the jazz drum can be heard - and at the end the audience in the illuminated hall cheers as if the dark days of patriarchy were over for all time.
"The Broken Jug", Deutsches Theater Berlin, next performances on December 19 and 26. (sold out) as well as on December 31, 7th, 11th, 21st and 25th
