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Scene from the new Zurich production of »Wilhelm Tell« (Sarah Brunner as Tell)
Photo:
Flavio Karrer
A revolutionary drama was announced, which at the same time should have been a liberation for Swiss national consciousness.
The audience gets to see and hear a jam session with guitar, bass and many amateur interpreters at the hall microphones.
On Saturday evening, director Milo Rau presents a »Wilhelm Tell« based on Friedrich Schiller on the stage of the Zurich Schauspielhaus.
And formulates several accusations against what is going wrong in Swiss politics and society today.
That's all sorts of things: "The production contains descriptions and depictions of violence, sexualized violence, racial profiling and weapons," warns a note inserted in the program booklet.
Friedrich Schiller's »Wilhelm Tell« drama tells of a tyrannical murder committed by the good citizen Tell on the bailiff Gessler.
And about the oath with which some Swiss tribal chiefs allied themselves at the beginning of the 14th century against the Habsburg rule in the country, namely on the Rütli, a meadow above Lake Lucerne.
At the beginning of the Zurich theater evening, the German actress Maja Beckmann tells us that she visited the lake and other important sites of Swiss history on a trip - and how interesting she found it.
Otherwise, there are first history lessons.
On an old-fashioned tape recorder parked on the stage, one hears excerpts from the recording of a 1939 Zurich production of Tell, when the play was shown expressly as an anti-fascist appeal.
The actor Sebastian Rudolph also reports that Schiller's play was one of Adolf Hitler's favorite dramas for a long time and was often presented with Nazi pomp in the so-called Third Reich.
Rudolph himself puts on an SS uniform, in which Gessler will often later play the tyrant, also in film overlays on the stage curtain.
Then you see Rudolph Gessler, for example, climbing around in the mountains and meeting Wilhelm Tell for the first time.
The titular character is played by a woman in this scene - it is, the audience is told,
about an amateur actress who works as a soldier.
Sarah Brunner is an officer in the Swiss army and was in Syria for the UN on a blue helmet mission.
Amateur actors answer the question "What is freedom?"
Pretty meta, all that.
As always, the director Rau works with direct cross-references to reality, ironic breaks, clever ideas for discourse.
»He who thinks too much will achieve little«, says Schiller's original play, which was first performed in Weimar in 1804 by the director Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
Apparently, this warning does not deter Rau.
He only lets Schiller play a few scenes, most of them in an ironically kitschy, foggy natural idyll scenery in the background of the stage.
The role of Tell is repeatedly taken over by other actors.
Sometimes the actors only move their lips to the tape recording from 1939. Rau gives a lot of space to cast fellow actors from everyday Swiss life.
you describe
The theater praises the evening at the theater as a »translation of Schiller's drama«.
A young geriatric nurse complains about how terribly deported many old people in Switzerland eke out their existence.
A man in a wheelchair tells us how he is fighting for more publicly funded lifts and escalators in the city of St. Gallen, which has a lot of stairs.
A refugee from Eritrea whose application for asylum in Switzerland was rejected five years ago is invited to have one of the rough police controls he experienced in Zurich reenacted on stage.
And a former forced laborer named Irma Frei describes how, as a young woman from a disadvantaged background, she had to toil in a factory belonging to the notorious Swiss industrialist Emil Bührle in the 1960s.
It was only after many years that she was able to break her silence, says Ms. Frei.
She receives long, hearty applause.
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It is a critical portrait of prosperous Switzerland that Rau succeeds in doing here, but unfortunately not a thrilling evening of theatre.
When Schiller wrote his play, Switzerland was popular and very fashionable in Europe.
It was celebrated as the settlement of freedom-loving, militant people with fresh ideas.
Today, Switzerland is a bit notorious among many people in neighboring countries, whether justified or not: as a place of narrow-mindedness, a lack of solidarity, a refusal to address dark aspects of its own history.
What is desired is a bloodless revolution
Even the historic uprising of the Swiss is "less a revolution than a restoration, with the aim of restoring old freedoms," write the dramaturgy team Ricarda Hillermann and Bendix Fesefeldt in a clever essay in the program booklet.
That seems to be the case to this day.
"A bloodless revolution is desired."
Ironically, in the case of this Tell spectacle, so does the director's work.
Milo Rau's somewhat caustic inventory of today's Swiss calamities radiates the friendly confidence that a better, more truthful coexistence can be regulated without any revolutionary brutality.
The only bloodthirsty demand on this evening of theater is on posters in the foyer and reads »Hang the Bührle on a cord«.
It applies to the manufacturer Bührle, who also supplied his weapons to the German Nazis during World War II.
The city of Zurich has been presenting Bührle's collection of paintings since last autumn in a new museum building, initially with scandalously trivializing accompanying texts about the collector.
Will the request from the theater artists
to tie the industrialist by a string, cause a great dispute?
no
Emil Bührle has been dead since 1956.
"William Tell". Playhouse Zurich. Next performances on April 26th and 30th. as well as 1st, 3rd, 5th and 8.5.
