Volksbühne Berlin – “wax or reality”: Where does happiness live?

They are all there: Heino joins Horst Lichter, the deceased Queen meets Albert Einstein, while Karl Lagerfeld moved back to us. We are looking at a section of the Hamburg Waxkabinett Panoptikum, which the scenographer Anna Viebrock has replaced us for the Volksbühne on Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz.

“Wax or Reality” is the title of the associated staging that had its premiere on Thursday. And almost too beautiful to be a reality is also the fact that Christoph Marthaler staged this tender theater evening. The probably most subtle director that this stage has ever seen has last held a premiere at this house in autumn 2016 – and has been painfully missing in Berlin since then.

So now the melancholy has its end … nonsense! Because bittersweet melancholy is the specialty of this great theater melancholist. It is Martha’s peculiarity not to make his longing productions at mourning events, but to provide them with a cheerful joke. Anyone who never breaks out in laughter once during a Marthaler evening must be completely dull. The same must apply to those who do not come to tears at any point.

With Marthaler, his family, which is designed in this way, comes back to the house. The stage designer Anna Viebrock has already been mentioned. It has transferred another inhospitable place to the theater room. The golden columns that structure the stage are symbolized a beautiful paradox: that is the cheapest, which should only look expensive. The balustrade that gave it its place is, depending on the stage for proud appearances or place.

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The actress Sophie Rois – not only at the Volksbühne – unfortunately had to fit due to illness. (Get well soon!) Among other things, with Tora Aulesstad, Jürg Kienberger and Clemens Sienknecht, some of the well -known singing players and playing singers are represented. With Rosa Lembeck, on the other hand, a fresh face is represented in the Marthaler ensemble, one of the most interesting new actresses on the Volksbühne.

With “wax or reality”, Marthaler also created a reminiscence of the Swiss writer Jürg Laederach, who died in 2018. Its experimental, almost neodadaistic texts and scenes that are torn down and reorganized in the staging are in their spail, in their game with rhythm and melody, the Marthaler Theater is quite related.

Laederach’s texts invite us to a big question that dominates the stage instead of an action: What is wax, what reality? Why does reality seem so artificial to us? And why the artificial so deceptively real? Like the wax figures that populate the Volksbühne and which can only be distinguished at second glance by the nine -person ensemble.

In the miniatures that join a whole, all figures fail in their lives. It is sad and funny and touchingly beautiful. Even the input scene makes it clear when Clemens Sienknecht runs between the middle of the stage and piano and “rhythm is a dancer” of the Eurodance pioneers Snap! as a queue melody. Of course with the mandatory note: “Please be patient for a moment, we are back for you right away.”

Waiting and passing, disappearing and dying are the topics of this evening. And they all write deep into life. “Not falling asleep!” Is the constant warning from the stage and the audience is pursued to the ongoing twilight of the figures. How they threaten to slip gently to life, however, happens graceful and funny – and at no time you want to look away.

“Life is a pistol that does not start,” says one place before the decisive addition follows: “Sometimes.” And it is later declamated in an engaging laconia: “I am Luftleer, my emotions do not want to slip.”

As usual, Marthaler adds lovingly compiled music to these scenes. And so what is seen translated into the pomp with incorrect pomp freed à la Munich freedom: “Once life comes and says yes to you / once the opportunity to flee from here / without tomorrow and how in the game / experience everything is never too much.” Or – a little folklum: “About the mountains, far to hike, / say people, live happiness.”

The distinction between wax and reality is hardly closer after the 90-minute evening. Rather, you already have the feeling that everything is one. Perhaps Christoph Marthaler has staged a programmatic piece. His work – the stage sets, the characters! – sometimes seem to be snatched from life very directly. And the next moment a stunning artificality determines the scene. And vice versa: Sometimes you think you are walking through the ruins of Berlin like in a Marthaler piece and surprises: Where’s the music?

Was that now? It is going through your head when the light ends. Almost nothing happened. A tipping on the spot, artistically exuberantly interpreted songs. Was that all, was that reality? Or just wax? A little kitsch? They were big pictures for the big topics, not embarrassed by supposedly simple answers and non-answers. Christoph Marthaler was a clever evening, sad and beautiful, who dismisses you thoughtfully into the unreal reality.

Next performances: 15th, 23rd and 24th March
www.volksbuehne.berlin