Max Frisch’s “Graf Öderland” at the Munich Residenztheater. – Culture

There has been a murder. A cashier killed a bank caretaker. With an ax. Simply that way. A murder out of nowhere. It stands as a radical act at the beginning of Max Frisch’s “Graf Öderland” – an act that especially shakes the main character of the play, the public prosecutor Martin, severely. So much so that instead of the files himself, he takes up an ax and becomes a murderer, yes, the leader of an entire movement. The case has the potential for disturbance. A murder out of revenge, out of jealousy, out of base motives could be explained, categorized, condemned. But murder for no reason? “It’s like a crack in the wall,” says Martin. You can wallpaper over it, but the crack remains. “And you no longer feel at home in your four walls – the absurd is there.”

The absurd is here! This is especially true for Stefan Bachmann’s staging of the play in the Munich Residenztheater, which has now finally had its premiere. It came out as a co-production in 2020, shortly before the start of the pandemic, at Theater Basel, and one or the other may have already seen it as a television recording. Because the Schreckensrevue was invited in May to the – this year purely digital – Berlin Theatertreffen and was recorded by 3sat. Live it develops a completely different visual and suction force.

The play takes place in the irrational logic and scenery of a dream – on a huge funnel stage

“Graf Öderland”, premiered in Zurich in 1951, is considered Max Frisch’s favorite piece. He wrote three different versions, but none caught on. What is fascinating about Bachmann’s staging of this seldom played “Moritat in twelve pictures” is its surreal interpretation of nightmare, which develops something frightening, ominously threatening. Where Frisch specifies a realistic setting – lawyers’ apartment, prison cell, grand hotel, sewer system, government palace – Bachmann’s action (he is artistic director at the Schauspiel Köln and Swiss like Frisch) takes place in the irrational logic and scenery of a dream. Olaf Altmann built a gigantic black funnel for him – a part that looks like a monumental gramophone pressed into the stage portal: round the front of the stage, tapering towards the back to a hole through which the actors get in and somehow stay on the sloping funnel slide and have to prove themselves. They stumble, seek support, make grotesque contortions – and then fall or slide more or less gently. It’s a bizarre slide into the human abyss. With tunnel effect.

Open detailed view

You automatically get on the wrong track on this stage. Steffen Höld ​​is, in convict clothing, the little cashier, the murderer with no motive, who acted out of sheer boredom. The way he crouches down in the black nothing of the funnel and happily spoons a can of bean soup, he seems to like it very well in jail. Finally something happened in his life. “Fortunately, people don’t always have an ax at hand,” the gendarme once said. Not to be drawn in! But prosecutor Martin has one, and with it the formerly impeccable civil servant, whose life consisted of nothing but work, soon goes through the country like a gunman. Rebellion of an angry citizen – or maybe a file hubbub with burnout. In any case, his example catches on, people recognize in him the mythical (invented by Frisch as a legend) “Count Öderland with ax in hand” and follow him like a rebel leader. What drives them remains unclear. It is a wild parable that can be related to a right-wing national protest bourgeoisie à la Pegida or the American Capitol strikers as well as to the lateral thinker movement, for example.

Thiemo Strutzenberger plays the disturbed public prosecutor – with a suit, tie and Max Frisch glasses – as someone who has been deeply hit, staggered, with a crooked posture and somnambulously directed gaze into the distance. A person in a state of emergency, deadly sad and enraptured right down to his way of speaking. He has for that at the theatrical affair receive the 3sat award, recognized as a “high risk wasteland”. It is deserved.

An expressionist horror grotesque with splatter and silent film quotes

Directed by Stefan Bachmann, the outbreak of bourgeois existence becomes a horror grotesque: with expressionistic gestures and poses, image quotations from splatter and silent films, borrowings from “Nosferatu”, Tim Burton, Tarantino, but also from painters like George Grosz or Otto Dix with her brightly overdrawn 1920s figures. The charcoal burners in the forest are funny, thickly stuffed pigs with lumberjack shirts and fur hats. When Inge (Linda Blümchen), who has longed for a wasteland, kills her father for the purpose of a private escape, she pulls bulky intestines out of his body. Red axes are rammed into the stage floor in front of the funnel. Theatrical blood splatters when the mad lawyer attacks his wife Elsa (Barbara Horvath) and her lover Dr. Hahn (Simon Zagermann) strikes. Whereupon they get up again, as is the case in a dream.

To the left and right of the funnel opening are four musicians who accompany the surreal goings-on in an appropriately gloomy, but also morality-like cheeky way and sometimes Rammstein– Strike notes. The Öderland revolt literally leads the insurgents underground, into the sewer system, and from there into the residence, where Öderland meets the rulers and the question of taking power. But here Bachmann’s director’s ax is already blunt. The “gentlemen of the situation” chant their text with dangling rats in a jagged, rhythmic (unclean) chant to the beat of the piano, and before your own brain has received a blow, the matter is already over. Light on. Awakening. General eye rubbing. If that was just a fearful dream, then not a private one: “They dreamed me,” says Strutzenberger. The sentence echoes darkly.