You first have to think of this combination: at the Munich Kammerspiele, the Polish-French director Anna Smolar combines Louis de Funès with neurology, i.e. slapstick with science, insanity with toughness. “Hungry Ghosts” is the name of the evening, Smolar found the title in a book by psychologist Gabor Mate, who by “hungry ghosts” means people with a great emotional need. So you first end up where these needs are particularly lived out, on the theater. At rehearsals for a jealousy comedy in 19th century costume.
Watching the production of theater and its failure in the theater is always fun (see e.g. “The Naked Madness”), because the actors can turn the valves up to the max. There are four domestic figures on the stage, pure scenery, very suitable for comedy, door open, door closed. The gorgeous Nicola Fritzen teaches his colleague Sebastian Brandes how to run against walls convincingly, which may not quite work out. Johanna Eiworth and Katharina Marie Schubert play mother and daughter, who play mother and daughter here, confusing private life and their characters, Jelena Kuljić tries to keep order as a make-up artist, and André Benndorff, as the director of this undertaking, is becoming increasingly desperate. Mainly because Charlotte, as Schubert’s character is called, suddenly stopped working, had catatonic fits and snuck through rehearsals in a somnambulant.
Also in the Nō theater characters are haunted by spirits. But this is about epigenetics
Then the crazy farce disappears like little by little the scenery, and the evening meanders towards the theme for which Smolar asked for a text by Mira Marcinów, around which the actors tell their own stories: epigenetics. The term means the scientific knowledge that traumata can be deposited in the genome and thus be passed on for generations. The trauma that befalls Charlotte and prevents her from playing is actually that of her mother. Their sister drowned when they were children. The dead aunt is now haunting Charlotte, appears on the stage played by Johanna Eiworth, Eiworth and Schubert become a Siamese double being, played fabulously well.
The fact that figures on the stage are haunted by ghosts is a topos of Japanese Noh theatre. But unlike there or, say, Shakespeare (the ghost of Hamlet’s father), Smolar isn’t about myth or guilt, it’s about a purely neurological mechanism that you have to acknowledge in order to deal with. Marcinów’s story, narrated here with great intensity by Fritzen and Kuljić in Serbian (with surtitles), is about the war in former Yugoslavia. And means all current wars.
Every character has their story here, not all of them are interesting, the theatrical farce crumbles, but returns in the form of Lucy Wilke, who, as a playwright, explains to the director with great grandeur that he doesn’t get it. It is an evening basically designed by the musically gifted, on which everyone finally gets rid of their spirits and dances. At the end, the empty stage is lit up like a northern light, and every neurological realization dissolves into pleasure.