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The problem with Marie Curie

2021-09-24T03:15:11.422Z


Landsberg - How do you portray a woman whose meaning for the world has long outshone the people behind her? The problem is also noticeable in the films that exist about the Polish scientist. The ensemble of the Munich touring theater “theaterlust” also slips on this bowl - even if the beginning is promising.


Landsberg - How do you portray a woman whose meaning for the world has long outshone the people behind her?

The problem is also noticeable in the films that exist about the Polish scientist.

The ensemble of the Munich touring theater “theaterlust” also slips on this bowl - even if the beginning is promising.

It starts brightly: poisonous green light dawns in the background, noises, the nerve-digging tinnitus that Marie Curie heard herself. The actors enter the stage, only as silhouettes, in the light alone Marie Curie (Anja Klawun): roses in her arms, blindfolded. She is about to have her star operation, her husband Pierre has long been dead, the play tells in retrospect. Marie talks to the young nurse Elsie (Amelie Heiler), one of the women Marie adores as an idol, a "guiding star". “I'm private here. As a person, ”replies Marie. Drum roll, different light, different time: Marie as a student at a girls' school in Warsaw. A gong, next scene, the mother has died - and roll the drum, back to the clinic of the opening scene.


The concept of time in Susanne Felicitas Wolf's play seems liberating at first, as it seems to break up the time series that is often tiring in biographical theater pieces. However, there are also limits to this principle: The fifth time the effect fades away - the biographical sequence dominates. And so director Thomas Luft also succumbs to the problem that is inherent in Curie's person: One wants to move away from the female power aspect, towards Curie as a merciless scientist who researches in order to help - and to get on with research; you want to move away from data and towards the essence of the figure. This also works in the first scenes. The dialogues in the clinic outline the problem of 'guiding star versus human being' in concise sentences. A statement like "I hate to put myself in the hands of others" defines Curie's character better than any other act.Or your longing for the dead Pierre - whose actor Johannes Schön circles Marie, stands in the headlight cone - and freezes into a photo. The idea of ​​integrating Pierre as a mute teammate: great! If this continues, it will be extraordinary, one thinks - and it will be disappointed. Because little by little, Curie gets lost in the whirlwind of action.


Of course, her time with Pierre has to be played, the affair with Paul Langevin mentioned, the hatred that met Curie as a woman because of it. But hints would have been enough, more tempo would have done the piece good. Brief information about the study ban in Warsaw, the trip to Paris - something that director Luft implements in the presentation of Curie's scientific work by only having Marie explain in a few sentences and not popping pistons on the stage.


But because almost everything is played out in the almost two-hour piece, the person behind the data becomes blurred.

If you ask yourself at the end who this woman was, an empty frame remains.

Too bad.

Because in addition to the good actors, the stage design by Arne Dewitz and Raymond Gantner, made up of crooked benches, including lighting and music by Anno Kestin, is atmospherically dense.


The 90 or so spectators were nevertheless enthusiastic about the piece and the ensemble - and thanked them with sustained shouts of bravo.

Source: merkur

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