Comrade Shakespeare – sweet death

“The most beautiful death scenes in the history of the opera” was a theater evening by the controversial director Alvis Hermanis, who turns 60 these days. A good ten years ago, the staging at the Zurich Schauspielhaus came to the premiere. And the name was the program: The low -action spectacle put us into the lounge of a retirement home in which the residents were preparing to intonate the arias and duets with the greatest possible Grandzza, which accompany the beautiful stage of the stage.

Hermanis has given a declaration of love to art – and showed the limits of its effect, as it were. As touching, the evening for the evening died again and again at the stage portal. And how strange does the whole thing look when it is presented in a series. And how sad, in turn, is one of the closer death in the knowledge that he will do without any gentle orchestra accompaniment.

Genosse Shakespeare

As you like it: Every two weeks, Erik Zielke writes about great tragedies, political lubricating theater and the fools from the past and present. He finds inspiration from his comrade from Stratford-Upon-Avon.

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On a similar dramaturgical principle, Douglas Hickox ‘British film classic “Theater des Grauens” from 1973. This plays the stunning Vincent Price with plenty of pathos the actor Edward Lionheart, who mainly understands the comrade Shakespeare. His great services to the theater and the bard from Stratford do not find the appreciation he wants. A critic price he already believed his own does not go to him.

After a suicide with a large gesture and not without great Hamlet monologue failed, he wants to take revenge on the journal. Each of the writers will soon see themselves in a Shakespeare drama: the first, like Julius Caesar in the tragedy of the same name, is made up and dismantled, the next one like Hector in “Troilus and Cressida”. Another critic finds himself in his own bed as in the rarely played “Cymbeline”. “The Merchant of Venice” will be rewritten so that the reviewer can soon be evaded as Antonio. Like Clarence in “Richard III.” The next critic is drowned in the wine. As in “Othello”, one is driven by intrigues to murder his wife, as the Johanna in “Heinrich VI” grilled a critic. And as Queen Tamora in “Titus Andronicus” are put forward to consuming their own children, a critic has to consume his beloved dogs, processed into cakes.

It is a film from a time when there were still a large actor who declamed the classics with not too taming self -confidence in a sonorous voice and did not leave any doubt that they said what they said. The big critics, preferably equipped with a glass of Château Latour, stood towards them, to which something of the shine of a much -noticed acting was transferred.

The murders in “Theater des Herrauens” are not sequences for a horror film, but only for the parody of one, how “the most beautiful death scenes in the history of the opera” only play in their actually dramatic context of the music theater works. The horror is lost and makes room for the joke; In addition, there is more than just the idea of ​​artistic quality that you can use. The comrade Shakespeare also survives piece by piece.