Theater – “In the loneliness of the cotton fields”: proud zeros

I do not stand the theater, ”Bernard-Marie Koltès said once. The unruly playwright with the tendency to scandals died of AIDS 36 years ago. For a while it seemed as if the modern classic of the French -speaking theater had a rich afterlife. But nowadays, it makes the impression that the theater has a hard time the once most played living author from the neighboring country. Perhaps his oeuvre is too rabid, too rebellious, too cropped and always unpretentious?

Now two, perhaps not unknown to the audience, are looking for these impositions: that of the theater and that of the author Koltès. The Lithuanian-English actress Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė, primarily on stage, but also for film and television, and at least in supporting roles in successful Hollywood productions (“Seven years in Tibet”, “Mission: Impossible”), sides with John Malkovich theater.

Malkovich, born in 1953, is the protagonist of several major cinema productions. But he started his career at the theater; He played with Dustin Hoffman on Broadway in the 1980s and regularly returned to the stage. He also has many years of collaboration with Dapkūnaitė.

At the Dailes Teātris in Riga, the two together in English developed the play “In the Loneliness of the Cotton Fields” by Koltès, which was already sent around half the world, and was now also shown at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg and is now shown in the Berlin Admiral Palace before it is guest in Düsseldorf Capitol Theater and then in various European cities.

The piece is about a nightly encounter: buyers and sellers meet. Apparently they come together again and again, the situation is the same and yet the game that arises from it is different every time. The two performers, both in white shirt and dark suit pants, pull all the stops.

If the two unknown people meet at first respectfully, but challenging, the roles will soon be exchanged cheerfully, body and voice will soon speak a different language. Tension shapes the game, gives way subtle eroticism, fear becomes visible, then the scene masters supposed gentleness.

Who has something to give here? Who wants to get something? And at what price? Who is the first to be revealed? Does his desire admit? And who shows himself as the weaker: the one who absolutely wants to sell something, or the one who has to own?

In all of this, the staging is liable for something clinical. This may be due to the oversized canvas, which documents the stage in black and white and via split screen. Every step looks exactly choreographed. It is the actions and reactions of two people who can hardly get together, even though one has what the other needs.

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Seven doors can be seen, a shower, an elevator, a school table hides behind it. How mysterious signs appear to us in this puzzling piece. That evening Malkovich once described the people, these eternal dealers. It is also proud of what is scenic. But certainly not everything can also be sensibly resolved by the audience.

Timofej Kuljabin has taken over the direction. The young director had already received orders on international stages before he left Russia as a consequence of the Ukraine War, like many other artists. In his staging, he grants his two players as much as possible.

Koltès’ piece is also charges against absurd mechanisms in real -existing capitalism that structure all of our lives. This 70-minute stage work reveals little of that. Kuljabin turns the scenic scaffold into the metaphysical, creates atmospheres, leaves the scary under the stage portal and transports statements about the abysmal human nature.

Malkovich shines with his nuanced game. He shows what he can do and visibly enjoys it. After all, it is his name on the posters that the audience should have pulled here. To watch one of Hollywood’s big live that is actually too talented for the stupid blockbusters from the dream factory is worth it. Unfortunately, he does not bring us closer to the Koltès.

Next performances: 10 and 11.6. (Berlin), 17th and 18.6. (Düsseldorf)