If you come into the theater, there is already a fairground entertainer, rather disheveled, but happy. He can do a few tricks, can make his thumb disappear or throw gold dust in the air. He is happy to play games with the audience because theater can now be played again here in Nuremberg, state theater in the big house. You have to celebrate it somehow, and two and a half hours later it is clear that it turned out wonderfully that evening. After the final realization that the foregoing was only theater, the ensemble is indignant that this Nur is not just, but somehow a whole world that is now back in Nuremberg.
This autumn, some houses open very gently, as if they didn’t quite trust the post-lockdown peace, others flaunted hours of maximum effort. At the Nuremberg State Theater, Andreas Kriegenburg, as his own set designer, paints the portal with peeling gold paint, hangs a bed sheet on it and first of all lets the theater play as if from a theater cart. Namely Pierre Corneille’s “Game of Illusions”, written in 1635 and translated quite freshly and quickly rhymed by Simon Werle.
While the juggler (Pius Maria Cüppers) is still juggling, the staff necessary for the game crawl onto the stage from a hole in the front stage, still dressed in private clothes, because Corneille wrote a prologue for his slightly confused tragic comedy, which opens a game in the game, and it works like this: Pridamant (Thomas Nunner) lost his son because he was so strict with him. Now he has a guilty conscience, and he wants to know what Clindor (Justus Pfankuch) was up to all the time, asks the magician Alcandre (Michael Hochstrasser) for help, and he shows him his adventures in four acts. Then the stage is open, you look inside a red barrel made of plastic sheets, on the bottom of which you can push a square wooden platform around; Kriegenburg doesn’t need much more equipment than Andrea Schraad’s costumes, he has the people on stage.
We find out: Clindor was hired by the immoderate braggart Matamore (Yascha Finn Nolting) and was supposed to advertise Isabelle (Pauline Kästner) as the latter’s Rosenkavalier, but took the matter much more personally. Result: Pfankuch and Kästner dance together like in the most beautiful La-La-Land. But now Isabelle’s father is little inferior to Clindor’s nastiness, he wants a rich game for the daughter, called Adraste, played by Felix Mühlen with wonderful idiocy. In essence, however, and this is where it gets complicated, all three gentlemen somehow also love Lyse, Isabelle’s servant, but because she is penniless, one makes fun of her.
The fathers dissolve with repentance. The season has got off to a good start in Nuremberg
That takes revenge. Llewellyn Reichman should never be underestimated this evening. The three younger men play with fabulous self-irony, a means that Kriegenburg loves and that is lived out here with the utmost liveliness on the stage. The three older ones are perfect administrators of beautiful language, and Michael Hochstrasser can also catch a few tricks, such as flying tarts with a butterfly net. Pauline Kästner soon has to get over a lot of lovesickness and heartache, but does so with the furor of self-confidence that Corneille cunningly created almost 400 years ago, which Kästner is now living out.
And then just: Ms. Reichman. In it the playful superiority of women over men as demonstrated by Kriegenburg is completed. Not only because she can play the flute, Nolting also makes music, plays the organ, sometimes more like a church, sometimes more like Hammond B3, there is also singing. Llewellyn Reichman is anger and joy, game and luck. She translates her speeches into sign language for the idiot, cleans up the stage, shines and makes nonsense. In the end, both fathers dissolve with remorse, everything turns out well and the season starts well.