There is a slaughter plate again at the Salzburg Festival. The big one, called “Schlachten!”, Served here on the Perner-Insel in Hallein in 1999 by Luk Perceval, took a whole day and after that the world of theater was different. There is now the smaller one, Karin Henkel has prepared it, it is called “Richard the Kid & the King”, lasts four hours, and afterwards the actress Lina Beckmann is celebrated by the then mostly standing audience as if she had just invented the theater.
Henkel is content with two Shakespeare dramas, “Henry VI.” and “Richard III.”, taking the very independent version of “Heinrich” that Tom Lanoye had written for Perceval at the time, entitled: “Eddy the King”. And like Perceval, she had the barren stage built by Katrin Brack, a dark, circular disc, over which many different sized flares float up and down, gently changing color, from white to apricot.
Richard, the biggest monster in the theater, is born, and three mothers stand by to make it clear to him what an ugly, disgusting, overgrown child he is. In the words of Lanoye, it is linguistically wild and coarse, and, in the case of Kate Strong, who will soon take over the sole mother role on stage, also frighteningly banal. In “battles!” Lanoye invented a continuous decline of the language, his “Eddy” was the penultimate station. With that, Henkel is now starting without any preparation.
The opening image comes back after four hours, Richard back on a rocking horse, the mothers. However, these brackets should not induce one to talk about a strictly planned evening. Rather, Henkel’s staging seems well thought out, but erratically implemented, unfinished, improvised, stumbled on for far too long and without any sense of rhythm. Although there is also a lot of music here, in tatters, pop, passion and piano, “Firestarter” (presumably), so bang.
Beckmanns Richard is an evil clown, full of physical force
The beginning, in which Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” and slowly pushing in the whole winter of displeasure – a dramaturgically actually exciting process – is still exciting in that Henkel tries to establish characters, which she increasingly doesn’t care about as the evening progresses. Nevertheless, the initial family histories are not suitable for psychological justification of Richard’s later acts – he wants to be the greatest because everyone teases him, that’s it.
But: The coproduction with the Hamburger Schauspielhaus shows off great people on stage, especially Kristof Van Boven. He plays all members of the Lancaster family, the tired King Henry VI, the power-hungry Margaretha, Prince Edward and Lady Anne, is partly in dialogue with himself and manages to succinctly fill every character with life. In the second part he is primarily Anne, a butterfly creature. In this second part, the ballad of Richard’s Morden, there are other pleasant appearances, Paul Herwig as an opportunistic Crown Council strategist, Alexander Maria Schmidt as a hesitant killer.
But above all there is Lina Beckmann, she plays Richard III. She is almost always on stage, commenting on this task as well as on her S-error, which the microport also highlights. She is painted like the evil clown she plays, she drools and grins, she is a physical force, full of unstable energy. But even she finds no remedy for Henkel’s lack of ideas, killing wears off, at some point you don’t care who is dying there, especially since the acts are sometimes involuntarily funny – once Beckmann clears an abdominal cavity and unearths intestines like sausage chains, i.e. slaughter plate.
And yet Beckmann is virtuoso, gets the male monster physiognomy very well into her body, is completely fearless, muddles with blood and food, can also be suddenly funny, flirts with the audience. But Richard is never terrifying to her, and certainly not pathetic. The whole loud, rumbling evening is more of a demonstration than a performance. The question remains, what is all this about?