Bavarian State Theater – The world as a dumping ground

A strange piece of literature is “The Rifles of Mrs. Carrar”, strange also for its author Bertolt Brecht. First performed in 1937, it is, along with “Fear and Misery of the Third Reich,” probably the only completed dramatic work by the writer that shows contemporary history so directly and not in a parable manner. Taking into account the rapid events of those days, Brecht even followed revision after revision.

In the 1930s, the international left turned its gaze away from Stalin’s Soviet Union and turned it – full of concern but also not without hope – to Spain. Brecht, who had already been a refugee for several years, also looked at the Spanish Civil War, in which progressive forces forged alliances, international brigades were formed – and yet fascism triumphed.

The shape of “Mrs. Carrar’s Rifles” is also unusual. Brecht, who has been declared an anti-Aristotelian, falls back into traditions that he himself had long since helped to overcome. A chamber play is the story of Teresa Carrar, who lost her husband in the fight against Franco’s generals, who fears for the lives of her sons, who we think we know is on the right side, and yet who doesn’t follow the path of the Violence can happen before she realizes that she has to do it.

Director Luise Voigt takes the Aristotelian dramaturgy and the pointed text seriously for her production at the Marstall, the studio stage that belongs to the Munich Residenztheater. However, it largely avoids the danger of emotional psychologism in the playing style. She adopts the use of language and the scenic structure, at least in passages, from a famous “Carrar” television recording by the Berliner Ensemble of the 1950s, and Weigel quickly lights up in the title heroine, played by Barbara Horvath.

The Spanish fisherman’s house is presented to us as a whitewashed shack (stage: Fabian Wendling) in which the ensemble comes together. It’s war. And that’s why every conversation becomes a competition of conflicting attitudes and, sometimes hidden, positions.

The fact that the production, despite the historicizing sound, does not become an evening visit to the museum and certainly not a re-enactment of a 70-year-old theater work is due, among other things, to the convincing idea of ​​having the actors work biomechanically (choreography: Toni De Maeyer). . Using Vsevolod Meyerhold’s method of biomechanics, they transform the stage action into a physical, expressively artificial game in which nothing remains accidental but rather becomes a testament to the highest concentration.

This concentration carries over into the auditorium. So Voigt outsmarts Brecht, who was struggling with the sensitivity of his own piece. The audience does not succumb to the chaos of emotions in a time of war, but instead follows the dynamics on the scene analytically.

And suddenly the big emotions arise in this first part of the double production. Voigt integrates one of the “Four Lullabies for Working Mothers” by Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler into the piece and naturally puts it in Carrar’s mouth. However, this neither denounces the previous staging approach nor invokes a simple solution to complex problems. The song is one of the most intense moments of this aesthetically and intellectually engaging evening.

»My son, whatever becomes of you: / they are already standing ready with clubs. / Because for you, my son, there is only the rubble dumping area on this earth, and it is occupied,” Barbara Horvath calmly sings out the first stop. Brecht’s lullaby and the play express the deep conviction that it is not just one country against another, one party in a civil war against another, but that every war is a fight between those at the top against those at the bottom.

A third oddity characterizes “Mrs. Carrar’s Rifles.” The piece can hardly be described as full-length. In Munich, the ensemble performs it on stage in 50 minutes. Brecht was well aware of this shortcoming and therefore suggested showing his drama together with a documentary.

“Strangling Lead” by Björn SC Deigner, which is having its premiere here, is not a documentary text, no, a poetic text in the best sense of the word. Deigner calls his piece a continuation and thus makes it clear what it is not: an answer or a correction, a withdrawal or a counterpart to “The Rifles of Mrs. Carrar.”

At the end of the first part, Teresa Carrar, following a gradually gaining insight, not only released the weapons for fighting, but also took up the weapons herself. In Voigt’s production, the stage design collapses loudly and it is as if space was created for a completely different kind of text: “There lies a body / and the body is called Carrar,” can be heard from the stage.

Where in the first part the pros and cons of violence are weighed up and the actions of each character are made scenically plausible to the audience, in the second part the perplexity that war brings with it suddenly takes its place on the stage. The Spain of the 1930s disappears and we follow the Carrar through unknown times and unknown areas. The character of a requiem is conveyed.

If Brecht asks about the necessity of violence in order to make conditions humane, with Deigner the war itself becomes visible in its inhumanity. These are not competing views, but complementary perspectives. Although Voigt has found an extremely convincing form for the first part of the evening, the second part occasionally gives the impression of an incomplete search in dealing with the text.

At the end, Deigner makes a machine gun speak. The weapon as a witness, the automated killing as an example of supposedly innocent murder and at the same time an expression of the greatest cruelty. Florian Jahr impressively portrays this character drinking tea while listening to piano music and reminds us once again that one has to talk about war differently in good middle-class rooms than in poor fishing houses.

Björn SC Designers like Luise Voigt avoid banal analogies in the here and now. After a good 90 minutes in the stables, you still feel well prepared to despair about the warlike present, because this evening at the theater avoids any simple simplification.

Next performances: December 17th, 23rd and 28th.

www.residenztheater.de