Julia Wissert took up her new post as director of the Schauspiel Dortmund last year under extremely difficult conditions. Her first directorial work “2170” was a city course in the open air due to the corona. Therefore it is not wrong to regard “Der Platz” after the French author Annie Ernaux as Wissert’s actual debut production. The dramatization of Ernaux’s 1983 “autofictional” memories of her father’s life and death in rural Normandy, of the gap between his lower-middle-class life and the increasingly bourgeois world to which the narrator had access through education, contains thematically much of what Wissert had set out to show from the start. Last but not least, the opening of the theater to something that is relevant to the place where it takes place. Post-industrial Dortmund is certainly not the worst place to think about the predetermined breaking points between the working class and the bourgeoisie.
The stage, exposed up to the fire wall, is only adorned by a small blue hut filled with tools and furniture. Over the course of around an hour and a half, it becomes a symbol of what the narrator’s father has achieved in life, but which he always limited himself to: his life as a farmer’s son, who first works in a rope factory, then more badly than right running general store and running an economy.
“Leitmotiv: Do not aim too high”, it says in the text. “Constant fear of being out of place.” It is incumbent on five female and two male actors to act out this self-limitation and at the same time to overcome it as the narrator’s incarnation.
Everything is played very concentrated, the ensemble acts exactly, as a unit.
The brightly colored costumes that Mascha Mihoa Bischoff put them in look like a signal-like, bourgeois contrast to the father’s clothes, which are described as simple – white shirt, flannel trousers. Exercises like the strenuous toe dance performed by Antje Prust or Mervan Ürkmez’s attack of wildly free dancing are the kind of bourgeois gestures that the father regards with both a constant feeling of inferiority and contemptuous suspicion. Often the performers are also in a close group, as if to emphasize the unity of the person speaking. The lecture is calm, regardless of whether the speech is of the parents’ touching admiration for the political student whom the daughter introduces to them as her future son-in-law, or of the father’s passing. Everything is played very concentrated, the ensemble acts exactly, as a unit.
The fundamental question that arises is why, given the original, more than one actress is necessary: one can read Ernaux’s narrow book as a monologue or as a dialogue with someone who is absent, with the blank space left by his father. In any case, it is a concentrate that lives from its lack of decoration. It doesn’t need any dramatic additions or polyphony.
Of course, the discrepancy between the soloistic slenderness of the text and its division into several characters has a certain charm. Of course, one can read that as an exaggeration of personal experience towards general societal validity. Ultimately, however, there is a lack of a compelling staging connection to a text that turns more inward than Wissert’s unquestionably decently structured stage production can do.