Munich Kammerspiele: Alexander Kluge's fireworks of ideas

Author and filmmaker Alexander Kluge celebrated his 90th birthday on February 14, 2022.

At the Munich Kammerspiele, Jan-Christoph Gockel has now staged the circus revue "Who always hopes dies singing" based on motifs from Kluge's work.

Our premiere review:

When the llama, whose name has the adjective “sad” in it, when the sad llama is flirting with stuntman Johnny Texas, nibbles tenderly on the ear of the handsome moustache, then we're in the theatre.

Here is the space of the as-if, here the reality can remain outside to give a view of what lies behind the reality.

Munich Kammerspiele: Alexander Kluge's 90th was celebrated here

Alexander Kluge, the thinker and "ghost driver" on all possible and impossible roads does nothing else.

The lawyer, author and questioner, filmmaker and TV producer turned 90 in February (read our interview on Alexander Kluge's 90th birthday here).

There was also celebration in the Munich Kammerspiele;

and in the Schauspielhaus on Saturday, April 2, 2022, "Who always hopes, dies singing" premiered.

Kluge, who has lived in Munich for many years, was in the audience – and at the end, visibly moved, thanked the gorgeous ensemble on stage.

"Telling is to man what digging is to a mole," he once wrote.

Director Jan-Christoph Gockel takes this sentence as the motto of his almost two-hour, non-stop and breathless evening with people, animals, emotions.

And because the mole doesn't care where the digging begins, Gockel starts with Kluge's film "The Artists in the Circus Dome: Perplexed".

The Kluge film "The Artists in the Circus Dome: Perplexed" is the basis of the evening

The work premiered at the Venice Festival in 1968 and was Hannelore Hoger's first film work.

Her role as circus heir Leni Peickert has been taken over by Julia Gräfner, who wants to implement her idea of ​​a reform circus wonderfully stubbornly.

"We're doing it differently now: show out, sense in." But "transparency theory" and all the other projects only work to a limited extent: Leni will, yes must, fail.

She confesses at some point that she is “at a loss”.

But that, explains Kluge, is not a bad thing: helplessness starts a search.

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The llama at the Munich Kammerspiele: puppeteer Michael Pietsch (left) and Sebastian Brandes as stuntman Johnny Texas.

© Maurice Korbel/Münchner Kammerspiele

Of course, he is only superficially concerned with artists.

In the film, the circus is also a symbol of our society – and failure harbors the chance to try again, to repair.

Sociologist Richard Sennett knows that repairing things means learning to understand them better.

Gockel therefore calls his production "repair of a revue" in the subtitle, which, based on the Peickert story, makes use of umpteen motifs from the colossal Kluge cosmos: the evening takes its name from the text about Antoine Billot, who described catastrophes, wars, diseases survived;

the motif of the bomb disposal is taken from the film "The Patriot" (1979) - and was already part of the production before Russia attacked Ukraine.

All the more intensely it now becomes an image of hope.

Standing ovations in the Munich Kammerspiele

But you don't have to (and can't) know all the references in order to immerse yourself in "Who always hopes, dies singing".

Gockel and his team also celebrate a circus revue, a stage festival - and turn Kluge's associative thinking and questions into wild theater: there is acting, singing, dancing, gymnastics.

Film, radio play, artistry, puppetry and acting alternate, overlap and complement each other.

Not everything works out (after all, it would be inappropriate if there were nothing to fix here), but there is much that is intense, clever, funny, touching or sad.

For example, when the great puppeteer Michael Pietsch lets his elephant dance while a voiceover reads the terrible fates of circus or zoo pachyderms.

Pietsch turns the animal and reveals its wooden skeleton.

Yes,

Leni Peickert can't get through with her reform circus.

But "the road doesn't end when the target explodes," it says at one point.

So let's keep walking;

no matter how hard you try, it's still fun.

Cheers, standing ovations.

(More theater? Read our review of the premiere of “In the Name of” at the Munich Kammerspiele here.)