The audience is coming now reluctantly returned to the theatre. This also has to do with the catastrophe mechanism with which society is reeling from the rain of one crisis into the fire of the next. Climate change, pandemic, Ukraine war, inflation, recently something about “monkeypox” is circulating. Bringing out a premiere of the reactor accident in Fukushima, eleven years later, and that in the big house, is a brave act from the Nuremberg State Theater. It doesn’t have much appeal at first. On the evening of the premiere, the cast in the cold stage is very, very incomplete and, unlike outside in beautiful May, you don’t want to get warm. The inhospitable winter video images from the contaminated area around the nuclear power plant do the rest.
But the all clear has been given: “The Invisible Reactor” by Nis-Momme Stockmann is less a tough, problem-oriented nuclear catastrophe play than a comically self-reflective artistic drama – and directed by Jan-Christoph Gockel, who comes from the puppet theater and is gifted with great scenic imagination, it has a theatrically sensual visual, intellectual and added value anyway. At the beginning, to the pleasant melody of Charles Trenet’s “La Mer”, an iconographic work of Japanese art slides in as a cardboard tsunami: Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa”. And then life-size stick figures, fluorescing neon green out of the black light on the stage, dance a kind of radiation dance. It is the opener for an evening that, despite all the catastrophe-fact contamination, is ironically broken and intricately complex.
You have to tell the story of how it came about, because that’s the real drama. In 2012 Stockmann traveled to Fukushima at the invitation of the Goethe-Institut. That was just a year after the nuclear meltdown caused by an earthquake and tsunami. He researched, filmed, interviewed people. In 2016 he did this again without having formed anything out of all the material. The Nuremberg Theater finally ordered a play from him for 2021, on the tenth anniversary of the accident. For this, Stockmann should go back to the scene of the action, together with the director Gockel. For his “Theatre of the Journey” he has already prepared research stories from Burkina Faso or the Congo in a very playful way with film and live elements. But then Corona made the excursion impossible.
Loud representative of the author Nis-Momme Stockmann: In Japan he is represented by Ishii Yuichi (on the screen on the left), Julia Bartolome and Moritz Grove play him on stage.
(Photo: Konrad Fersterer)
The thing didn’t burst anyway, because Gockel had meanwhile seen “Family Romance, LLC” by Werner Herzog, a film about the Japanese agency of the same name, where you can hire surrogate fathers, surrogate friends and other substitutes for all situations in life. This agency was founded by the actor Ishii Yuichi, who plays himself in Herzog’s film. The Nuremberg team also booked exactly this Mr. Ishii to send him as a substitute to Minamisōma in Fukushima Prefecture. His mission: as Nis-Momme Stockmann’s representative – also in a checked coat similar to his and accompanied by a camera – to visit those places and people that he had already visited. The images from this are shown on stage on a magnificent gold-framed video screen: Mr. Ishii driving through the desolate landscape, standing by the Pacific, strolling through a memorial. He also meets the woman Wakamatsu who helped Stockmann to make many contacts at the time. Her husband, the poet, essayist and nuclear opponent Wakamatsu Jōtarō, has since died. He gets an extra credit.
While dapper Mr. Ishii does the on-site work, there are four other Stockmann deputies on stage, embodied by Julia Bartolome, Moritz Grove, Llewellyn Reichman and Raphael Rubino, all highly playful. They have something of the Playmobil males, decked out in lumberjack shirts, glasses, and neatly parted plastic bonnet hairdos in the way the author chooses to wear them. His multiplied wrestling with his material and his economy of notes is as vain as it is comical. The reactor accident, negotiated as a writing crisis. But also as an appropriation problem. how to start How to tell about the catastrophe at all? What can be “truth” here? How hegemonic or catastrophe touristic is the European perspective?
“The closer you get to something, the blurrier it becomes”
“You can only hysterize it or play it down,” is the fear right at the beginning. The staging does not fall for either one or the other, but with the representative principle has a solution that can be coherently developed further on stage. After all, theater is always representation. The outfitter Julia Kurzweg has built a backstage area in the style of a baroque street stage, which is multiplied to the rear. Here it comes to beautiful decoration gimmicks and video mirroring. Even the arched portal with the old-fashioned cogs at the top contrasts the documentary character of the reactor theme with the magical scenery of the theater illusion machine.
It’s a totally convincing concept, cleverly conceived and made as a game of deception and a questioning of perception and representation. In the execution, however, the piece suffers from the author’s excessively displayed ego. As “invisible” as the eponymous reactor remains (“The closer you get to something, the more blurred it becomes”), the more visible it becomes, Stockmann, whose sensitivities are all too important, even in the (sometimes a bit dull) Japan scenes. The deputy also contributes little personal perspective. When asked what touched him personally at the Fukushima Memorial Museum, Mr. Ishii admits that the main thing he paid attention to was “how I look in front of the camera”. But then again, this vanity fits quite well.