Joël Pommerat: Theater Oberhausen: Execution of the audience

Fog wafts between people in glittering clothes who talk about their fates with a fixed gaze, croon pop songs into microphones and fatally injure each other’s souls. There is a constant ominous sound coming from the speakers until the noise suddenly increases, a strobe lights fire and the ensemble comes together in a new constellation of terror under the protection of the blinding light.

You feel like you’ve been transported to the set of a David Lynch film. The American director, for his part, has a soft spot for stages. Many scenes in his films and series take place in front of typical red curtains, behind which something terrible is hidden. The job of a horror film director is to suggest the horror, but not to show it so blatantly that it can be completely explained. It’s a balancing act that Joël Pommerat walks in a similar way with his piece “I tremble (1 and 2)”. The events must be mysterious enough to affect emotionally, but there must also be enough moments of understanding to keep the audience intellectually engaged.

The Frenchman Pommerat, born in 1963, has been a sought-after author in German-speaking countries for several years. His text “The Reunification of the Two Koreas” was played up and down from Vienna to Kaiserslautern. “I tremble,” on the other hand, had to wait a long time for its German premiere, which came out on Friday at the Oberhausen Theater. Pommerat himself premiered both parts of the piece at the renowned Festival d’Avignon in 2007 and 2008. Gerhard Willert’s translation contains specific stage directions, which is rather unusual for contemporary drama. So it is more of a protocol for a production that has already been developed than an offer to the director.

Director Wolfgang Menardi deviates from this script in a few places in his two-hour production, but leaves the required revue setting intact. At the beginning, Klaus Zwick, as emcee, addresses the audience directly. A figure with a white mask stands behind him and whispers the words he has to say: “At the end, afterwards, at the very end of this evening, I will die before your eyes.”

This sets the bomb: death as the final magic trick of a spectacular show. In fact, the emcee soon admits that he actually killed himself long ago because his lover broke up with him. Some of the following scenes are about how he could have prevented the drama.

Partly via voice-over from the tape, partly in monologue, Zwick at least provides some clarification in the somewhat confusing story: selfishness had prevented the emcee from seeing his wife for who she really was. After finally understanding this after his suicide, he crosses the line of death again in order to improve himself, which – somewhat counter-intuitively – in this case means not hiding his own badness from himself, but living it out. Zwick and Regina Leenders play this out not exactly subtly in a scene in which he asks his new lover to part with her mermaid tail in order to tell her after the operation that he no longer likes her.

The cynicism, the mental and physical violence, but also the sadness are often the results of the play’s loose sequence of scenes. A vampire is up to mischief; a murderer gives advice to heavily pregnant women; a criminal triumphs in court; a woman confesses that all the sacrifices she has made in her life have been completely pointless; A supposed spectator is unceremoniously shot when he tries to ask a few critical questions.

The eleven-member ensemble throws themselves into these nightmarish scenes time after time. Mirjam Stängl built them a stately stage for their sad horror piece: a round surface, the halves of which bend at a 45-degree angle, and a hole in the middle into which someone keeps diving. Sometimes you think you can see flames blazing out of it. One suddenly wonders whether the characters will fall into purgatory or straight into hell.

Next performances: June 7th, 15th and 19th

www.theater-oberhausen.de