A very unusual look at Karl Valentin

Created: 04/10/2022 07:47

Who's wearing the pants here?

Heike Feist and Andreas Nickl served a very special Karl Valentin evening at the Fools Theater on Friday.

© Thomas Plettenberg

The Bavarian stage partner is ill and now someone who only speaks Berlin speaks in.

Ironically, in a piece about Karl Valentin.

Is the?

And how it works: The thoroughbred actors Heike Feist and Andreas Nickl offered a top-class evening of theater at the Holzkirchner Fools.

Holzkirchen

– In her series “Biographies for the Stage” on Friday, Heike Feist took on the great Munich popular actor, author and comedian Karl Valentin (1882-1948).

"It won't work anyway!" she called the program, which presented the audience in the almost sold-out Fools Theater with a lot of unknown things about the protagonists.

The presentation was bursting with theatrical delicacies and was dramaturgically exciting.

This is due to the fact that the play takes place on three levels that are elegantly interwoven: on the one hand, the theater rehearsal, in which private matters are also negotiated between the performers;

secondly - if it went well and Nickl didn't scold his partner for her Berlin dialect and asked her to at least speak High German - the play about the life of Karl Valentin and Liesl Karlstadt himself "The strangers", "At the doctor's", "Where are my glasses?" or "The zither lesson".

In her biographical approach, Feist worked out Valentin's complex personality.

Birth, childhood, adolescence (“I was so skinny that my mother used my ribs to grate horseradish”), professional development and, above all, private life.

Here Feist alternated between the roles of Karl's wife Gisela, with whom he had two children, and his congenial stage partner Liesl Karlstadt (1892-1960), with whom he was not only closely connected professionally.

"Such a marriage for three is not easy either," he admits in the play.

Valentin Karlstadt had their first evening together in 1915 with "Tingeltangel".

How proud was the comedian of the century when he was allowed to present: "A hunger artist who starves live in front of an audience" or "a soubrette that has forgotten her text." The comedian finds glasses without glasses, whose personality Andreas Nickl authentically incorporates, "Better than nothing" and his daughter he writes an "account for your existence", from midwife costs to school registration fees to daily food and pocket money.

At the time, the press attested the skinny Munich man to be a "wonderful mixture of nonsense and profundity".

Feist and Nickl work out the fact that Valentin was anything but a fun guy privately, but suffered from stage fright, panic travel, pessimism, hypochondria (“not at all sick is not healthy”) and asthma, as well as some drama in Karlstadt’s vita: you often collapses on stage, attempts suicide on the Isar Bridge in 1935, suffers from a difficult partner.

Often on the Fools stage, it's the quiet scenes with their pauses, when the two rub against each other or are about to break up, that make this evening so haunting.

The play is more than a mere series of sketches.

This theatrical work impresses with intensive research, dense dramaturgy and haunting play - and proves that Valentin does not only work in Bavarian, because he is still a big name in his guild.

REINHOLD SCHMID