Theater premiere »Iphigenia« in Salzburg: family quarrel with high trauma density

Enlarge image

»Iphigenia« leading actress Rosa Thormeyer, fellow players: A master piano student mutilates herself by breaking four fingers

Photo: Krafft Angerer / Salzburg Festival

Marital quarrels are actually always a big hit in the theater, which is why there are a few hearty laughs at the Salzburg Festival in a fundamentally dark and serious premiere with heroic figures from ancient Greece.

"My husband doesn't agree to the divorce," complains the beautiful Helena (Lisa Marie Sommerfeld), styled as a vulgar vamp, about her husband Menelaus (Stefan Stern).

From the stage floor, where she is lolling next to a grand piano, she gives him a venomous look and says: "The bear has gotten fat, now he's a pig."

The Polish director Ewelina Marciniak and the playwright Joanna Bednarczyk try to retell the classic tragedy »Iphigenia« as a modern tabloid hit under the title »Iphigenia«.

The story of the young woman, whom her own father Agamemnon wants to send to a sacrificial death for reasons of state, is set in plays by Euripides and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe against the background of the Trojan War.

As many know, it broke out because of the dispute over the beautiful wife of Menelaus, Helena.

Bednarczyk now shows a heroine sacrifice against the background of the fight against sexual abusers.

On the stage of the Industriehalle on the Pernerinsel in Hallein, the main theater venue of the Salzburg Festival, you can hear the sad-looking actress Rosa Thormeyer, dressed in schoolgirl costume, in the role of young Iphigenia, reporting on years of brutal assaults by her uncle Menelaus.

"I have no intention of keeping quiet about it," she says.

But also: "I'm just an unclean rag." Her father Agamemnon, the brother of the abuser, wants to avoid any scandal because he absolutely wants to make a career as an ethics professor.

His daughter, a highly talented pianist, gives up her career as a musician and breaks four fingers on her right hand one after the other in a slightly crazy self-mutilation scene – for which her father gives her a blue, glowing ice pack.

The "density of trauma per square meter" mentioned in the play is quite high in this dysfunctional Greek family.

The director Marciniak is 38 years old and a stubborn, much admired rising star in the German-speaking theater world.

She was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen this year with a Mannheim production of »Jungfrau von Orleans«, which she worked on together with playwright Bednarczyk.

The program booklet now reads about the »Iphigenia« of the two theater women that the heroine is »confronted with a system that protects (male) perpetrators and shows a certain social tolerance of violence (against women)«.

The director shows big gestures and bright characters

Unfortunately, the characters on stage also speak a strange discourse German.

"None of us are free from this poison," proclaims Iphigenia's father, Agamemnon, portrayed by Sebastian Zimmler as a nervous university careerist, about male greed and the tendency to sexual assault.

"Even yoga won't help you," the heroine is taught by her mother Klytaimnestra (Christiane von Poelnitz), who works as a theater teacher in Bednarczyk's adaptation of the play.

She claims: »Big gestures devastate people.«

The director Marciniak, however, shows exactly such grand gestures – and seems to have zero interest in her characters, who only appear as garish types.

In the very first frame of the play, almost naked ghostly people attack the young Iphigenia in a slow-motion dance, who also has an older doppelganger here (played by the mother of the actress Rosa Thormeyer, whose first name is Oda).

Later, a huge towering mirror is seen falling sideways like a guillotine onto the stage.

At some point, the living room of the Agamemnon family turns into a water desert.

And then the grand piano catches fire.

At the end of a two-and-a-half-hour evening of theater co-produced by Hamburg's Thalia Theater, there was a few boos and rather weak applause.

Salzburg's theater program shows an embarrassingly weak text

The theater is suffering considerably from the weakness of the texts at this year's Salzburg Festival - there is no friendlier way of putting it.

Acting director Bettina Hering, who has been in charge there since 2017, has presented four productions.

In addition to Bednarczyk's rewriting of the classic »Iphigenie« there was also an alleged reinvention of Arthur Schnitzler's »Reigen« by several authors.

The result, prepared by director Yana Ross, not only looked like a number revue from a high school theater work group, it also sounded very much like it.

Most critics thought that the drama »Crazy for Consolation«, which was put together by the director Thorsten Lensing himself and has at least some great actors, was also a chillingly dull text.

A case of dramaturgically crude and ruthless editing of the play was »Ingolstadt«, director Ivo van Hove's mix of two plays by Marieluise Fleißer, in which, as with Lensing, only the actors were convincing.

For the head of acting Hering, a Swiss woman born in 1960, the poverty of this year's Salzburg spoken theater output is apparently not a problem.

Hering is currently being traded as a candidate for the directorship of the Burgtheater in Vienna, the proudest and probably also the richest German-speaking stage.

In the Burgtheater, currently directed by Martin Kušej, there has only been one woman in the top post.

Karin Bergmann did the job from 2014 to 2019.

Hering has never managed a larger theater, only a state theater in St. Pölten for a while.

Does that spoil your chances of becoming the Burgtheater director?

We live in a present in which contemporary theater "tends to break away from men who have dominated for a long time," writes the writer Helene Hegemann in the program booklet for Salzburg's "Iphigenia."