Present in the background: During the photo rehearsal for the ancient tragedy “The Persians” by Aeschylus in 2003 at the airfield in Neuhardenberg, Brandenburg, Hendrik Arnst closes the hangar door.
Photo: dpa
Dripping time can be like dripping blood. Hours, hours, hours. With the agonizing and fascinating length of his productions, Frank Castorf became legendary at the Kosmos Volksbühne: a courageous, melancholy man of stopped clocks. For years. From Hebbel to Dostoyevsky, from Celine to Malaparte. The ensemble like a lively stake of flesh in the flow of violence and torment between “depraved banks” (Heiner Müller). Hendrik Arnst always in the middle.
He was one of Castorf’s “poetic fighting machines”: a master of the shabby presence, the ostentatious rudeness, the greased soft soul. Firm or fluttering in the jelly-like body. Preferably a thoughtful, then overly nervous, stumbling, staring, twilight, staring, trembling, sweating, sleepy, dawn-like figure. He liked to crucify his characters to a stupid ghostliness. Zuckmayer, Döblin, Bulgakov: a turtle in a military coat, a gang of crooks in Berlin’s gutters, a grease pan freak in Moscow’s snack bar underground.
Arnst, born in Weimar in 1950, studied acting in Berlin, was one of Castorf’s disciples in Anklam, the GDR province known as Prairie Route 66, since 1994 at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz. He enjoyed playing lead into the head of his “middle ground and background roles” (Castorf). In the endless colportages of scraps of theory, invocations of faith, helpless questions about life in total emptiness and intolerance to humanity, he was the cutaneous and smock and sackcloth counterpart to the high heels of the Volksbühne aesthetic. In the famous “Pension Schöller” coup, as a waiter he threw pegs across the stage at the wall as if he wanted to become darts world champion. When he uttered the word “cockroach” in Dostoyevsky, ancient Russia suddenly rose from the cellar.
Hendrik Arnst revealed the beautiful life: how an actor becomes a bard. Nasty, chummy juggler for a theater that raised questions about morals and ethics into hoarse, vodka-soaked hysteria, in that Castorf world that only allows ethical values one asylum: the shivering, goofing, the godlessly lewd farce. The actor’s lounging, lurking, lethargic radiance came from the haze of some side street. He sometimes had that confused, crazy look in his eyes that threateningly shows how injury and disregard turn into aggressive force. When he laughed, a disguised demon laughed, and in the cocoon of deep seriousness there was always a fat, teary comic figure. Hendrik Arnst died on January 2nd at the age of 73.
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