Stefanie Reinsperger, an actress like an unlocked hand grenade and a specialist in extreme conditions, can of course play anything. But she particularly likes to devote herself to figures that unmistakably have a heavy blow to the monstrous. Such a monster is Thomas Bernhard’s Bruscon, the title hero in his play “Der Theatermacher”, a rehearsal stage dictator of the very old school, whom she now bangs down at the Berliner Ensemble with all the Reinsberger force and delicacy. The theater maker relishes his professional title: “State actor!” – and with such a status you can do pretty much anything in your little world. He grabs and torments his unfortunate daughter long and painfully until she spits out the words with which he raises his messed-up ego: that he is “the greatest actor in the world” – this Bruscon does not make it below that.
Stefanie Reinsperger also shows the forlornness of her character, the artist as a poor sausage.
(Photo: Matthias Horn)
He suffers the most from his eccentricities when, in one of his fits of rage, he shouts “Art! Art! Art!” roars and, for lack of other victims, dismantles a small table as if it were the last obstacle on the way to world fame. Toxic masculinity is not at all an expression for the tyrant director, who trundles through provincial inns with his self-written play and is so convinced of his own genius that he has nothing but contempt for the rest of the world: “Shakespeare, Goethe and I !” He takes his family hostage to his artistic megalomania, everyone has to play along, and of course they don’t meet his standards. The son (Adrian Grünewald): “debil”, the daughter (Dana Herfurth): “stupid”, the poor wife, who only torments herself through her monologues with fits of coughing (Christine Schönfeld): a real “anti-talent”.
With the theatrical madman, we are unmistakably dealing with a “narcissistic, misogynist asshole,” as Reinsperger succinctly characterized her character in an interview prior to the premiere. But because Reinsperger is not only a powerful, but also a clever actress who doesn’t want to denounce her characters, she shows the tender soul in the creep, the hopeless forlornness in the madness of the genius, the artist as a poor sausage.
At the Berliner Ensemble, the director Oliver Reese stages this with loving textual accuracy, in the past one would have said: true to the work. The village inn in Utzbach, the guest performance venue where the theater maker ended up, is a desolate, cluttered shithole where no one has removed the cobwebs for a long time (stage: Hansjörg Hartung). Toilet rolls are stacked on the wall, a deer’s antlers are gathering dust in the back next to a painting of Hitler – we’re in Austria. In the words of the theater maker: “There is nothing here but pig farms and churches and Nazis.” The fact that the theater maker and theater man is portrayed here by an actress is not an exclamation mark on gender theory, nor is it in any way an ironic refraction, but simply a game. After about two minutes, you no longer think about Reinsperger’s gender swap. A great actress can play anything, even a motherfucker.