Berlin theater meeting – taken into the dramaturgical lack

With two productions, the German Schauspielhaus Hamburg is invited to the theater meeting, a third, »the shadow presidents. Or: There are seven women behind every big idiot who try to keep him alive, ”was among the 38 nominations. Could be said for the theater in 2024.

With “Bernarda Alba’s House” (from Alice to Federico García Lorca) and “The Machine or: Above all the peaks is quiet” (by Georges Perec and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe), two so remarkable and different productions in Berlin are now visiting.

“Bernarda Alba’s House” is already a rather unpleasant place at Federico García Lorca. After the death of the family of the family, the mother prescribes extensive grief with house arrest. This is much required by young people, which is why the mother does not shy away from physical violence to assert himself. The foreclosure against a world with raping men outside as hostile as an hostile world can also be read as a parable on fascism.

Katie Mitchell brought the play on stage in November 2024 in Hamburg as a claustrophobic dystopia. Eduarda Alba runs the continuation of patriarchal structures in a gloomy realism, while precisely choreographed slowdown players illustrate time jumps and dialogues are cleverly cut. The ensemble performs this with extreme precision, which also requires the audience a lot of concentration. Perhaps it is not so much a matter of always being at the level of the gruesome events. The delightfulness that develops in the claustrophobic atmosphere is plastic enough; Melanie Wilson’s enhancing sound in violent, tops. Intensive 90 minutes.

The second invited staging is staged no less precisely and just as long, but otherwise from a completely different cut: “The machine or: over all peaks is rested” Georges Perec in 1968 designed as a radio play for Saarland broadcasting. Goethe’s famous poem “Wanderers Nachtlied” is taken apart by a computer, analyzed, associated, newly combined, in short: deprived of its usual authority. The Perec specialist and as a director for the first time at the Schauspielhaus Anita Vulesica has now put Perec’s work and thus Goethe in the dramaturgical lack.

Sandra Gerling acts in a retrofuturistic machine sink, behind which a stylized forest clearing is hidden with space for an expressive dance, as a “control”, Christoph Jöde, Moritz Grove and Daniel Hoevels are employed as “memory” with various linguistic operations, Camill Jammmal, among other things, gets sound recordings. Yorck Dippe occurs occasionally as a perec.

Here, too, the precision, with which the ensemble brings this breakneck experiment to the stage and talks a lot about poetry itself, about language (and their science), about Goethe and German longings, about endangered bird species and high mountains. This evening is at the same time gorgeous funny.

Large, daring theater with which the German Schauspielhaus proves that it is one of the most exciting German theaters in the present.

Presentations of “Bernarda Albas Haus”: 2nd and 3.5. (The staging can also be seen in full length in the 3sat media library.)
Presentations of “The machine or: over all peaks is rest”: 6. And 7.5.
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