You have to be very determined these days to want to go to the theater in Bavaria. 2 G plus applies at 25 percent occupancy. That is moderately attractive, for the theater and the audience. So it’s all the more beautiful when the test station breaks down in the meantime, like the one near the Residenztheater, just in time for the after-work rush. Queue despite appointment. The audience can only make it into the performance through the intervention of the theater staff. So you can make it even more difficult for the battered houses.
The 25 percent of the audience, however, who make it to the Cuvilliéstheater despite the adversity, will be rewarded with a crazy-enraptured theater evening: Thom Luz’s “The Clouds, the Birds, the Wealth”, a commissioned work for the Munich Residenztheater. Thom Luz, in-house director, is famous for his theatrical magic, for his play in the intermediate worlds, always dreamy, sometimes nightmarish. Stage poems in the fog, if you will. This time he has made three comedies by Aristophanes, “The Clouds”, “The Birds” and “The Wealth”. He first approached them through titles. There are three passing phenomena, if you will, and wealth is ultimately nothing more than a man-made claim. Based on Aristophanes’ motifs, Luz has tinkered with a puzzling piece about thinking and the oppressive moment when you can no longer keep up with thinking and have to allow the chaos in your head.
The setting is – after all, we are in ancient Greece – a phrontisterion, a school of thought of Socrates, in which a few eager students want to acquire the “advance through knowledge”. They wear white overalls and faces painted white. “We are looking,” says one student, “for healing and knowledge.” “And the best possible advice!” another. “And consolation from the bad world!” it’s not a shame either. Socrates – played in the scene by Mareike Beykirch, but actually there are no clear role assignments – nods sternly and benevolently. Let them get.
Behind some inflated people there is nothing but a steamy chatter, or: air cushions filled with theater fog.
(Photo: Sandra Then)
This “think tank” (stage: also Thom Luz) is reminiscent of a gymnasium or a lime white boiler room: Styrofoam balls, gymnastic benches, pipes run along the high, bare walls. The students balance huge air cushions, reach into them again and again, and theater fog escapes. A symbol of steam chatting or the notorious hot air? Because whether the elite of tomorrow will really come together in this remote space, as Steve Jobs and his colleague once did in a garage, or whether it is more of a refuge for discarded philosophers, remains a question of perspective. The aura of a closed institution always adheres to the room and those wandering about in it.
What drives people in their innermost being: the desire to penetrate the world
Perhaps both are also true, the line between genius and madness is known to be narrow, many a thinker has been declared crazy, and many a crazy person has been declared a thinker. In philosophically insane conversations the six then discuss the oracle of Delphi as well as the bad habits of money or the problems of the “recorded word” and the advantages of volatility: “Peoples of this earth never write anything down. Whoever writes something down holds a thought against his will while passing by. ” All misfortune in the world began at the moment when people began to write that the multiplication of knowledge might not be that effective at all?
In Aristophanes’ texts, a Socrates, who was moved by natural philosophy, repeatedly denies the existence of the gods, for example when he says that the clouds make the rain: “Shouldn’t Zeus be able to let it rain even when the sun is shining when they are gone?” Obvious. It is liberating and inspiring to be a spectator of this school of thought, to discuss questions that seem so far removed from the dreary world situation, like luxury in these dark days and yet remind us of what drives people in their innermost being: the desire to close the world penetrate. This is the most beautiful theater of escapism without escapism as pure escape thoughts.
The whole thing is orchestrated by Daniele Pintaudi, who has set up pianos and tape recorders in front of the stage and accompanies the scenes with fine music and recordings. Again and again he cherishes the pupils, refers to the originals by Aristophanes, born 444 BC, and reminds them what we are actually dealing with here: a very old text. In the end, that is quite unexpected, but Thom Luz said often enough that he “could not come to any conclusions,” the six do not rebel against Socrates, but against this conductor of all people. They chase him away and, mutated into zombies, jump to the instruments themselves. Enigmatic. But then again: “Chaos is welcome, because order has failed”, it says at one point. Who would really want to contradict that, especially today?