Landsberg - Is there an objective 'limit' to abuse? Can you deny this feeling to a person who feels humiliated? The sentence “It's not that bad” often has the effect of a painful slap in the face for those affected. The play "The Truths" by Sarah Nemitz and Lutz Hübner deals with this question. But also with the question of power in relationships. Yesterday the Metropoltheater was a guest at the Landsberger Stadttheater with the four-person chamber play.
Two couples: Sonia and Bruno, stuffy and well-off thanks to a banker job, Jana and Erik, rather short of money. They have been friends for a long time, and sometimes they take care of each other's children. That's why Erik's text message arrives at Bruno, saying that they don't want to see them anymore with a "We don't want to discuss this", which is extremely surprising for Sonia and Bruno. Bruno doesn't want to call, "that makes us small". After years of financial support, the banker suspects that they want to "shoot them down" and grow into their "righteous rage". Jana is constantly overwhelmed, that has already been shown at the messed up coaching weekend that Bruno gave her. It could have been so easy for her as a pretty woman to "flare up a bit". She reacted to a "couple of stupid jokes" like an insulted behavior teacher.
Sonia knows that there is more to it than that. Because Jana told her about it. And she told Jana about her affair, the result of which is son Nico, which Bruno graciously accepted. What Bruno doesn't know, but Jana does know, is that Sonia had a long affair and that this man raped her and made her pregnant when she wanted to end it. Nico should never find out. “There are irresponsible truths.” Only men know of another truth: Erik has been cheating on Jana for a long time. Bruno thinks that's okay: Erik should have shot Jana long ago.
In dialogues of different constellations - sometimes the couples, sometimes just the women or only the men - a story of abuse and its disregard is revealed to the viewer. And the power of hidden truths that unbalance relationships. Perhaps this is exactly where the problem lies in Nemitz and Huebner's play: What is more important now: the question of what abuse is - does it only exist sexually? Does it include butt-grabbing? Is it even possible to ask this question? Or is it about the question of the power structure in relationships?
Two such big issues can unravel a piece. And that's exactly what the viewer has in the one and a half hour long chamber play, which consists only of dialogues. They are getting shorter and shorter, interrupted by the rotating, pleasantly reduced stage setting. But they don't really lead to an end. The tension built up runs in the sand. The fact that Erik takes a position against Bruno and for Jana in the end (which will leave him anyway, but he doesn't know that yet) is incomprehensible. Only shortly before did he even attribute the “typical female sacrificial thing” to Jana as a basic attitude. Leo Reisinger also seems to have problems with the role of Erik: The role seems artificial, wooden.
Katharina Müller-Elmau as Sonia and Mara Widmann as Jana, on the other hand, are convincing.
Even if their roles, like those of the men and the situations in general, are sometimes drawn out too boldly.
Michele Cuciuffo is outstanding as a “middle-aged, western European male primate”, as Bruno describes himself with a self-ironic expression.
He rumbles through the area, convincingly plays the supposedly reflective macho and in the end swims carelessly again to the superficial.
Director Jochen Schölch relies on dialogue, apparently in an unabridged form, and it is also difficult to delete the numerous aspects of the plot that the viewer needs to know to understand the play.
So the piece offers profound moments.
But in the long run it gets stuck in its form.