Silent happiness: Gilla Cremer in the Landsberg City Theater

Created: 07/10/2022, 20:06

By: Susanne Greiner

Gilla Cremer (right) and Rolf Claussen showed "What you can see from here" in the Stadttheater Landsberg - textually reliable and with great ease.

© Greiner

Landsberg – What can you see from here?

Not much.

A section of the reality of life, a piece of the puzzle of the big picture maybe.

Or just everything that makes up life.

At least that's what the author of "Everything you can see from here" Mariana Leky thinks.

Your novel seeks and finds small answers to the big question of meaning, and in extremely poetic words.

Gilla Cremer and Rolf Claussen have carefully transformed Leky's word poetry into images and movement.

Reduced, quiet, light - and just as delightful as the novel.

The visitors in the Stadttheater were enthusiastic.

Fanny van Dannen knows all about okapis.

He wants a poster of the cute little animal for his birthday - and gets one from a Malayan tapir.

But an okapi is unmistakable, as Selma, Luise's grandmother knows.

"Actually nothing can come after an okapi." She likes to dream of the animals, "their tapir hips, the deer eyes and the body of a giraffe".

An animal anything but sinister.

But still: after every okapi dream Selma has, someone dies in the village.

Within 24 hours - sometimes maybe a little late.

What a perfect prelude to a novel and a play whose sentences and events appear surreal due to a lack of causality in their sequence.

But that's exactly why they are so incredibly true to life.

Cremer and Claussen avoid grand gestures.

They remain as quiet as the novel, build on the poetry of the text, which shows things without having to explain them.

The props: beer benches that become Ikea shelves, floors so thin that you can break through them.

Laundry flutters in the background.

Not more.

The two actors don't slip into the roles of the numerous protagonists (Leky doesn't do that either).

They are narrators and enrich the text with reduced play.

Cremer only steps out of the play twice and switches to Luise's self: when Luise's childhood friend Martin falls to his death from a broken train door.

And when Selma, Luise's anchor, in whose heartbeat the world pulsates, who reinvents Luise's world a second time after Martin's death, "minus one": If Selma dies and the life-saving fried potatoes with her, then the narrator Cremer tears into her ego.

There are two moments in which the world "takes its course", as Luise describes it.

And of course these moments are part of the whole.

The novel and the play ask what constitutes life.

When Martin and Selma play the game “What you can see from here” on the train – Martin guesses with his back against the fatal train door after a long practice with Luise as a prompter, what is lurching past outside the train window at what moment – ​​then this is a first answer of many to the big why.

What makes life is what surrounds me at the moment, is the moment in its frame.

Lined up, there is life.

This also includes, and Leky and her protagonists know this only too well, drinking and absent fathers, the great love that you have to lose in order to keep it (yes, there is a happy ending).

And of course the fear of death, always, but especially when Selma dreams of the okapi.

This includes the relief and the feeling of happiness when nobody dies despite the okapi dream.

And that also includes the human habit of forgetting this feeling of happiness again when the next utility bill is billed.

Life consists of snippets, say Leky, Cremer and Claussen.

Logical sequences are pure illusions, "that's how the mind works," says Selma.

He looks for connections where there are none, for example between an okapit dream and death.

The important thing is to decide on all the snippets that are fluttering around.

To internalize what you can see from here.

Or as Luise's great love Frederick, the Buddhist monk, might say: "the absolute obligation to be present in one's own life".

Leky's novel is not so successful for nothing.

It causes that small, wistful smile of happiness that you can feel in your eyebrows.

Cremer and Claussen seem to travel their game on that smile.

"What you can see from here" was the start of the theater season in the Stadttheater - a pleasantly well-attended one: around 200 wanted to see Gilla Cremer and Rolf Claussen.

Let's hope it continues like this.