As if the technology understood, a fire alarm went off after fifteen minutes. A siren blares and a voice, allowing for little disagreement, announces that everyone is to leave the building. At first one still believes that this is part of the performance, which would not be surprising. But the alarm is real, well, half real, because there is no fire. Just a lot of fog on the stage. And he moved to where a fire alarm was lurking, which went off despite the instruction to shut up during the performance. This leads to a one-hour fresh air break, which one is glad about in retrospect. Because it goes on again, exactly at the point where it left off, and soon in this further course there is a great longing for another fire alarm.
Nikolas Darnstädt stages Schiller’s “Johanna von Orleans” on the very large stage of the Munich Volkstheater and spares no effort to create the most comprehensive boredom that has been experienced in the theater for a long time. His basic idea is great: Johanna, this strange peasant girl who, plagued by divine inspiration, drives the English out of France and puts King Charles on the throne, is superwoman. She lives in a Marvel Comics world, which is an island floating in the sea toward the abyss of the world where two sword-making dynasties are at odds. Capitalism and war are one, if one becomes a traitor here, he goes to the others as CEO.
“Kill Bill”, “Game of Thrones” – everything has to go in
That sounds rational, but it isn’t. Because: comics. fantasies. Asian Sword Fighting Movies. German silent film expressionism. “Kill Bill”https://www.sueddeutsche.de/muenchen/.”Game of Thrones”. Whatever, everything has to be clean, garish, colourful, loud, useless, and one can well imagine how the Darnstädt brothers once re-enacted this material at home. Then Nikolas probably wrote imaginative new lyrics, and Lukas made music for them, on an old Roland Jupiter 8 synthesizer, with which you can design the really big soundscapes. In any case, Lukas actually makes the music here (and plays the confused King Karl), it roars and rattles in a wonderfully simple symbiosis with the stage fog – both together trying to conceal how sensationally hollow everything is here. A lot of Schiller is roared, without variance, sense and reason. But: There is Superwoman. Nina Steep. She flies (really!) and fights, a performer in her own right. But even she cannot escape here.