Sapir Heller directs Dürrenmatt at the Munich Volkstheater and continues “The Visit of the Old Lady”. Now it's the premiere.
Friedrich Dürrenmatt called his play “The Visit of the Old Lady” a “tragic comedy”. It premiered in Zurich in 1956, with the legendary Therese Giehse in the title role, in the middle of the economic miracle phase after the Second World War. Conscious repression, deliberate forgetting and a very elastic concept of morality were on the agenda. Justice was an illusion and material superiority was the only currency that really mattered. If you remember this, it is no longer surprising that this macabre classic is currently on the schedule again from Dresden to Zurich. On Saturday (April 13, 2024) the drama, which gave the Swiss writer his big breakthrough, premiered at the Munich Volkstheater. The director is Sapir Heller, who has lived in Munich since 2008 and has already staged several plays at the house such as “Amsterdam” and “Animal Farm”.
Sapir Heller tells Dürrenmatt's play at the Volkstheater from the perspective of his granddaughter
“There are pieces like that,” she describes in an interview with our newspaper, “that are somehow suddenly in the air.” She didn't know anything about a trend when she suggested the drama to director Christian Stückl. “I was interested in the theme of revenge. But in a broader sense: If there is no coming to terms with a terrible event and this creates trauma that continues in the following generations.”
For this reason, she simply moved the text back in time by two generations. In Heller's case, the aged billionaire widow Claire Zachanassian doesn't come back to her hometown of Güllen to take merciless revenge. This time her granddaughter, who has become rich as a musical superstar herself, appears to make the small townspeople pay for the injustice that was once done to her beloved grandma.
“I wanted to see what meaning revenge has when we are not directly affected by the crime. Does that still matter? I think so. But in a different quality,” summarizes the native Israeli. “My family comes from many countries,” she says. From Syria and Ukraine on his mother's side, from Austria on his father's side. “Although they were able to flee in time to Israel, which wasn't even called that at the time, they still lost many relatives in the Holocaust. So I have a direct connection to dealing with such inherited traumas.” They exist on both the victim and perpetrator sides, and you quickly end up with topics such as guilt. Heller no longer sees this for her, the third generation after the Shoah. But there is a great responsibility to ensure that such things never happen again.
Today, German schools teach extensively about National Socialism. “Every school class visits a concentration camp memorial at some point. There are many events. But my friends have told me that it's still hardly talked about in my own family. Shockingly few knew about what their grandparents had done during the Nazi era. There is still a lot of silence and hardly any discussion.” That's exactly why the 34-year-old was interested in it. Because “we live in a different time than 1933. But things happen often enough now and everyone is silent,” says Heller. “Before the situation worsens to such an extent that objection is no longer possible or even becomes life-threatening, we must defend ourselves.”
Sapir Heller sees this as her very special task, on stage, using the means of the theater. She quotes Martin Niemöller's famous poem "When the Nazis brought in the communists..." about the meaning of resistance and emphasizes: "It's no longer just about me, but about society as a whole. And it’s our responsibility to do something about it now.”