First of all, this endeavor is pure hubris. Doing an evening with scenes from Karl Valentin and at the same time wanting to design a homage to him. Homage, well, that seems doable. But the scenes, the little plays, the ideas, born out of the beer vapor of the suburban pubs and brought to life only by him – and Liesl Karlstadt, of course. You can’t, you can’t put Valentin on the stage, he’s been dead since 1948, and there must be a reason why the theaters hardly dare to approach his work, because you could just put on a record at home. The person Valentin, a self-created art and life figure, is far too exuberant in his peculiarity to be able to take his artistic legacy as from any author. And now they’re doing a “Valentiniade” at the Munich Residenztheater, which can only go wrong.
It also goes wrong. But only briefly. Then it’s a triumph. It was certainly a good idea from the outset to put the direction in the hands of Claudia Bauer, because she also has a strong artistic individuality, which one would hardly, a priori, associate with what Valentin did, which, however, does not immediately raise the risk that something is being imitated here. So Bauer takes an idiosyncratic selection of Valentine’s scenes and brings them to the stage in true Claudia Bauer fashion, albeit more fragile and diaphanous than has already been experienced from her. He wrote about this Playwright and author Michel Decar Transitions and intermediate monologues into the game text – whether you need them is an open question. In it he wanders around Valentin’s fears, a broad field for sure, but also speculation as the starting point of the evening.
First, failure is presented as a form, then the way is clear for the evening
It is by no means certain whether Karl Valentin really died when he was accidentally forgotten overnight in the Bunter Cube cabaret – he had bronchitis before. But it doesn’t matter, here it starts, today there, Preysingstraße 42, is a penny market, you can see it in the video. And then you see Lukas Rüppel as a fabulously good, because free Valentin imagination, Pia Händler visits him as Death, so the evening is arranged thematically. As a result, Claudia Bauer presents failure as a form with two Kafkaesque over-the-top scenes (“Orchestra rehearsal”), then everything is clarified, and free of all the injustice that has now been overcome, it will be a fabulous evening.
The ludicrous musical quality is definitely to blame for this. Michael Gumpinger invents a grandiose, unique 1920s sound, plays it together with Leo Gmelch and David Paetsch, there is much more, “Swan Lake” music with tuba, for example. The music narrates every scene, weaves everything together, incredibly well, as well as the choral and solo singing of the ensemble drilled by Gumpinger. A dream with Pia Händler as a soubrette, Isabell Antonia Höckel because at all. Katja Jung goes through as Liesl Karlstadt, Max Rothbart and Nicola Mastroberardino as everything, and in the end the realization remains that it can be worthwhile to tirelessly fight against your own downfall and the absurdity of existence.