Sandra Hüller – »Penthesile: A: S«: Cut carrot, wash your hands

Penthesilea and Achilles – the story is known in one or the other tradition. She, the Amazon Queen, and he, the almost invulnerable gods, are loving warriors. The old Kleist has taken the cruel game of the sexes to the extreme in his drama: the archaic law of the Amazons forces them to be able to free the lover if she also defeated him in combat; Achilles wants to pay this price and yet is crushed in Penthesileas fighting and love zeal. The queen finally dies in madness over her inappropriate.

It is a story about the war of the sexes – between Achilles and Penthesilea, but also in each of the two themselves. In other ways, the war of the peoples is told. And also of the war of the law against the realm of sensations.

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The French author Mardi has thoroughly overwritten with her piece of “Penthesile: A: S” Kleist listed at the Festival d’Avignon in 2021. Penthesilea celebrates the Amazonian resistance to male violence, soon complains about the patriarchal order. And Achilles also questions the gender roles at some point. In the end, there is no death and indissoluble contradictions, but the high song on the collective, overcoming the binary system and on the one with nature.

Now Sandra Hüller has taken on the substance to help him in Germany. The premiere was celebrated at the new Theater Halle on Maundy Thursday. And you cannot attend a directorial debut every day, counts Hüller, who changes between the stage and camera, but one of the outstanding actresses of her generation and is one of the main reasons from which you no longer have to be ashamed of German films on an international scale.

Hüller has taken a co-director with Tom Schneider to help. Together they divided the text into a dozen players. Before the first series of spectators, take a seat, built in front of them, and let, finely arranged, let the words pound on the audience, while some of them get up, step onto the stage, go off and once again in line with the seated choir. The reduced stage events and the urgent text are split up.

Of course, the like only works if the text also has a quality that justifies such a focus. Is there this quality in this case? You won’t find the Kleistian complexity. And linguistic? A little reminds the piece to Eve Ensler’s “Vagina monologist” from a gray past. There is talk of a “vulving army”, “stiff and firm as your tail” of a spear. To differentiate between the sexes, the author states that one is “festival like flint”, the other “soft and moist like gelatin”. Well, the knowledge is not new, but it was rarely packed in such literary clumsy formulations. And when the sentence falls “Nothing is certain in time”, you feel that you have arrived in the world of calendar sayings.

The stage is filled with a kitchen on this one and a half hour theater evening. Hands are washed here and carrots are cut. If the contradiction between the home environment and martial text initially creates a tension, this effect evaporates very quickly. This very concrete stage situation reduces the problem of the gender war in an inappropriate way. And the show value that the organization of everyday kitchen activities offers is unfortunately very limited.

But for whom is the carpenter covered for? You don’t peel potatoes without deeper (scenic) reason? Czechow taught us that a rifle that can be seen on stage in the first act should also be fired in the third act. A century and a committed expulsion of the dramatic from the theater later the inclined spectator knows: If vegetables are snipped on stage in the first quarter of an hour, he can also hope for a small snack at the end of the theater evening.

And so you do without this quiet and rather underlying staging on everything that could be unpredictable. With the end of the piece that is trained at Donna Haraway, which appeals to us all, but finally becoming one with nature, is finally served: there is soup and baguette. If you want, you can get to the set table from the spectator stand. A drama does not take place, all conflicts are pacified, there is agreement on all levels. Hopefully it tasted.

Next performances: 19, 23.4. and 17.5.

www.buehnen-halle.de