It’s a bit strange that an evening at the theater in which Claus Peymann reads Thomas Bernhard, the booth isn’t run over, when the general admiration of the writer Bernhard continues to increase, and director Peymann is the one who more or less Bernhard single-handedly for the theater at a time when the theater was still causing scandals, especially in Austria, where the two together caused several moderate earthquakes in the 1970s and 1980s. But the Renaissance Theater, where Peymann read from Bernhard’s works on two consecutive evenings, is in Berlin, and there you don’t understand anything about love. What is also not understood in Berlin is a certain, very entertaining form of cockiness. In a city where adults would obediently wait for minutes at a red pedestrian light, even on traffic-free days, people with charming megalomania are naturally suspect.
Read the first night Peyman in a red wingback chair that once belonged to George Tabori, from “lumberjacks”. It is said to have been a party, with some standing ovations. The second evening, it was Friday, was comparatively quiet, which may also have been due to the fact that parts of the audience had already been there the evening before. It was an older crowd, maybe a little tired the second night. Peymann is no longer the very youngest either, as he himself remarked at the beginning. He was greeted by warm applause, he appeared, all in black, his Mao jacket buttoned up to the top, and played the emcee, casually standing at the edge of the stage.
The night before he was full of doubts. “After all, it was my first performance as an 85-year-old.” There was applause at this point, because Claus Peymann’s birthday was on June 7th. Today, however, he comes optimistically. This can even lead to a difficulty, namely vanity. The audience laughed and the director of the theatre, who in fact he is no longer, but of course will always be, announced how the evening would go. He will now read for an hour, then there will be a break. And then another 47 minutes. Anyone who is tired can take a nap or walk, “but be careful” – short cunning pause – “the best text is the first one after the break.”
Then he sat down in a black wicker chair, from which he got up from time to time to play a passage, and read the entire (small) book “My Prices” by Thomas Bernhard (Suhrkamp). It only appeared after his death, which is why it is not clear whether or how he wanted it published. For this evening, the dramaturge Jutta Ferber, Peymann’s partner, shortened it in an interesting way.
The best moment is, as always at the theater, a small breakdown
Many of Bernhard’s typical repetitions and interlacings fell victim to her line version, which allowed the text to focus more efficiently on punch lines, but also changed the overall sound. What Peymann read didn’t really sound like Bernhard at all. What was peculiar to the texts had been expelled, this hatred of people that scarcely moved, ravishingly grumpy and righteously spreading in all directions. What remained was glorious enough: hilariously funny stories about, well, the prizes that Bernhard won, from the Grillparzer to the Büchner Prize, which, with one exception, his first, the Julius Campe Prize (1963), never gave him because he naturally detested the whole circus associated with the honors, above all the busybodies who thought they were honorable and wanted to adorn themselves with the prizewinner. He really hated everything about awards except one aspect: the prize money.
Guided by pure, undisguised materialism, Bernhard, as he happily admits himself, drove to the awards ceremonies, dreamed up stupid acceptance speeches (he figured it was basically a simple “thank you”), endured hors d’oeuvres with politicians – and then finally go home with the respective prize money and use it to buy an old farm, for example.
Peymann, who still performs outside of theaters today full-bodied interviews able to cause excitement, read aloud as if all he had done in his life was record radio plays for children. Insanely nice, with accents and perfectly used pauses. He didn’t sound like Bernhard, who had recited his own texts rather monotonously, which revealed the insidiousness, some might say insidiousness, in the most magnificent way, but much friendlier. Harmless maybe. But no less funny. The audience listened raptly.
Once there was a small glitch, when suddenly a page of text was missing, and Peymann then freely retold the relevant story from the Anton Wildgans Prize to the end, which, as always with breakdowns in the theater, was actually the best (because the freest) moment .
Nobody left early, nobody fell asleep. And if there were more performances, everyone who was there would probably come back.