One thing has to be left to Martin Kušej’s “Maria Stuart” production: it doesn’t even pretend that it wants to tell Schiller’s “Tragedy in Five Acts” from the inside out and let it work, using a deductive directing process. Here someone approaches the piece from the outside with his special, not exactly surgical cutlery and chisels pictorial tableaus from the text. With the result that there is a lot to look at, but little to sympathize with, to cheer for. The staging had its premiere as the last drama production of the Salzburg Festival on the Perner Island in Hallein and will go to the co-producing Vienna Burgtheater, where Kušej is director, in autumn.
The very first appearance pithily reveals everything, Kušej’s methodology as well as the outcome of the piece: suddenly a redhead falls out of a rope and dangles back and forth on a rope. It is the severed head of Maria Stuart with a long red mane, and it wouldn’t be a bang-out scene by Kušej if theater blood didn’t spurt out of the trimmed queen’s neck. Severe shock. There are 30 naked men on stage, longingly stretching their arms towards the once beautiful woman’s head, because women beckon forever.
Two queens in the center – and yet the system is dominated by men
These 30 extras, which shape Kušej’s staging on the Perner Island in Hallein visually and aesthetically and which carry them like columns made flesh, are there from the start. First sitting, with your back to the audience, then standing with your legs apart, always in a new arrangement and arrangement. Choreographic mens spreading. A directing maneuver with a show, but also a distraction effect. 30 naked men’s butts, approved for assessment, because who wouldn’t take a closer look – even if they turn around and shamelessly present their front. The men form the framework of the staging, a body corps in a row and, um, limb. They have no text, just one gender. You exert pressure with sheer nakedness. If they put on gray winter coats every now and then, they look even more like an army. Woe if they would strike.
You can read it feministically. Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” is a queen piece with two strong female figures in the center, but it’s a man’s world. The system is and will remain male dominated. Kušej, not a fan of subtle allusions, emphasizes this by the fact that in his version shortened to two hours forty (dramaturgy: Alexander Kerlin) other female figures such as chambermaids and nurse Hanna Kennedy have been deleted. There are only the two antagonists Elisabeth, Queen of England (Bibiana Beglau), and Maria, the Queen of Scotland imprisoned by the Queen (Birgit Minichmayr), surrounded by loads of testosterone.
“It is power that oppresses me here.” Birgit Minichmayr as Maria Stuart
(Photo: Matthias Horn / Salzburg Festival)
The men are not in power here, but they do have power and use violence. Not only the inmate, who comes across as particularly battered in this production, has to put up with abuse and let her massive guard Paulet (type of Kiez doorman: Rainer Galke) brutally touch her. Elisabeth is also gripped imperiously by her favorite and admirer Leicester (Itay Tiran) and roughly gripped by the chin. Once he carries her like a living doll through the sculpture forest of naked bodies.
“It is power that oppresses me here”, are the meaningful first words in Kušej’s line version, spoken by Maria Stuart. By this she means her dungeon situation, her insubordinate imprisonment by Elisabeth, who fears Maria’s claims to rule on the English throne, but of course also targets the aggressive male society that surrounds her in a key message. Birgit Minichmayr, who roughly spits out Maria’s misfortune, looks in this scene like a victim of torture before the burning of a witch, her face pale made up, with bitter features, her head bowed with the flaming red wig hair, but not her defiance and will, which are throaty and proudly break new ground again and again. Minichmayr makes this as haunting as possible with minimal resources. She wears a kind of sweatpants and a nude look on top, stands there like a dog on a leash, with a red collar, from which a rope stretches like a trail of blood to the back wall.
The fact that one has to think of bondage and sado-maso practices when looking at them is an association that Kušej and his costume designer Heide Kastler often use later, for example with Bibiana Beglau’s black breast bandeau. The naked male bodies do the rest to charge the scene violently. Mortimer, who loves Maria ardently and wants to free Maria from prison, so actually the “good guy” in Schiller’s construction, is indeed an intimate speaker with Franz Pätzold, but should be enjoyed with caution. His strangling declaration of love to Maria almost turns into rape: “I want to own you too!”
A theater of clear signs
The sober, abstract stage design by Annette Murschetz, a closed room with black sand on the floor, creates a gloomy, claustrophobic atmosphere. A border of cold, angular spotlights stretches across the rotatable foam wall panels. Everything is extremely exhibited here. A theater of the obvious. In addition, each figure is clearly marked in terms of costumes and symbols. Itay Tiran can already be seen from the casual look (powder blue oversize coat, lank hair) and the beer bottle to see the shadiness of his opportunistic Leicester. The double game that he plays leaves cold, however, and that it is he who takes Maria’s confession at the end (instead of the deleted Melvil) is a crazy idea. Mortimer comes from Paris, so he wears a fashionable Pepita coat, the just admonisher Shrewsbury (Oliver Nägele) is in a solid green coat of reason, and the Grand Treasurer Burleigh in a noble suit with ring and chain can be recognized immediately as the (own) powerful state rooster and queen whisperer, when Norman Hacker throws himself very explicitly and nastily in the chest anyway.
Elisabeth seems very alone from the start in the circle of these doers and males. Although she literally wears her pants (initially: a white trouser suit) and insists on her independence, Bibiana Beglau also shows the insecurity and fragility of her figure, gives her surprisingly soft moments, keeps her freezing and struggling for composure. The way she does this in structural terms, with the minimal bends of her sinewy body typical of Beglau, is fascinating, but also harbors the danger of being mannered. At the meeting of the two queens, the climax of the drama, she is only the domina who gives herself cool. The leather glove she wears on the left is the same eggplant color as Minichmayr’s sexy leather boots, a connecting detail between two rivals who could also be sisters. But the red-flaming smugness, with which Maria then triumphs with relish, gives Elisabeth such a defeat that she can no longer recover from it. What Beglau is playing there crying is a real nervous breakdown, very unreally emotional, ending with her signature on the death sentence. And because the Kušej Theater is one of the clear signs, she paints Elisabeth’s name in red on the men’s backs beforehand.
But some pictures turn out really strong. One of the most beautiful is actually the encounter between the two women at Fotheringhay Castle: the rivals at a distance in the empty room, examining each other like on an erotic blind date, a lightbulb swinging between them, which sometimes illuminates the face of one, then the other and creates shadows throws. Or at the end, when – after a kitschy Assumption of Mary in the fog of the stage – Beglaus Elisabeth in a red velvet dress stands there like a statue of herself. Left by everyone, she hums “God Save the Queen”.
That is the price of female power retention: radical loneliness. All the robust images, divided by notorious blacks, can ultimately not prevent a certain conversational drama. Too much is about bare surface – and too little under the skin.