Attention, the Münchner Kammerspiele have set a trigger warning before the production “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)”. The text contains “descriptions of acts of sexual violence that can be stressful and re-traumatizing”. Are theaters so overly cautious that they have to warn against art? You send an eye roll emoji internally. On the other hand, Sivan Ben Yishai’s language is really very blatant, very explicit, and what she says with it includes sexual perversions as well as violent pornography, child abuse, rape, murder. Perhaps you should know that before you want to spend a carefree evening in the theater. But it can also be that the alarm signal lures some in the first place. “Let’s be honest – trigger warnings sell,” it says, only half ironically, in the text.
This text, a so-called text area without role assignments and scene instructions, convinces with its radically shameless, radically self-confident female perspective as well as with its linguistic composition and power. A revealing comedy joins the drastic. Sivan Ben Yishai was born in Tel Aviv in 1978, studied theater directing and scenic writing in Israel and has lived in Berlin since 2012. Already in her piece “Liebe / An Argumentative Exercise” she dismantled traditional romantic and relationship thinking patterns based on a couple and at the same time pursued a feminist self-exploration.
Medusa was the first victim of victim blaming
In “Like Lovers Do (Memoirs of Medusa)” Ben Yishai now looks more fundamentally at the structures of sexual violence. This ranges from abusive relatives, politicians and professors to rape in marriage to human trafficking, torture and enslavement. It’s not just women who are victims, people with a penis too. It is written like a litany, whereby the author herself speaks of a “song”: “This song is dedicated to the lovers. The lovers who lay on top of me, one after the other, under the sun.” So she lined up one dedication to the next, following the principle of dedication of love songs: “This song is dedicated to the one who stroked my hair while I sucked his cock and looked down at me from above, like a father.” Or: “… the one who stuck his finger in my vagina like he was fixing a car.” Or: “To the one who cut my throat while he was coming.”
Guys with selfie sticks that zoom into vaginal openings, rapists, exhibitionists, sex tourists. Some who grab and gape, others who look away or applaud. It is a dark parade, mythologically framed by the fate of Medusa, who, according to legend, was raped by the sea god Poseidon in Athens’ temple. Whereupon Athena took out her anger not on Poseidon, but on Medusa, whom she transformed into the well-known monster figure, the sight of which turns everyone to stone. Medusa can therefore be considered the first victim of Victim blaming be considered, so the reading of the Kammerspiele dramaturgy. From their side it is also said that the piece is “a modern measurement of the patriarchal gender model as a cross-cultural and epoch-spanning system of violence that is reproduced through tolerance and support”. Uff.
Bekim Latifi simmers in the broth of gender stereotypes.
(Photo: Krafft Angerer)
On the stage, however, this cultural-historical-intellectual approach to interpretation is not pursued, do not worry. The staging of Pınar Karabulut is low-threshold in a motley bouncy castle atmosphere, not to say: anti-intellectual, also anti-brutal. In any case, she undermines the harshness of the text with all means, from the trendy costumes (Teresa Vergho) to the comic and zombie-like style of play to the nerve-teasing synthesizer soft pop music (Daniel Murena). You have to like Pınar Karabulut’s penchant for hideously combined neon colors and aesthetic aberrations. It can hurt too. If he should, the director, who is geared towards cheerful “empowerment”, has achieved her goal. In any case, it doesn’t get cozy despite the fun attack, too much refers to degeneration, disturbance, wrong development.
The strong man doesn’t have it easy either. He has to deliver all the time
The hideous stage (Michela Flück) shows a mixture of boudoir and patriarchal palace, equipped with a mustard-yellow curtain wall, a water basin in the floor and four rocket-shaped rubber columns. Two of these inflatable pillars, from which the air soon disappears, show an upside-down Medusa head on the base, as in the famous Yerebatan cistern in Istanbul. There are many such quotes. You don’t have to understand them all, just as you often don’t understand the text in the choreographic swarm and rumble of sound (and you’re happy about it).
Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Jelena Kuljić, Bekim Latifi, Edith Saldanha and Mehmet Sözer form a dynamic collective of text performers, constantly on the move. A five-part choir from which individual vocal bodies are separated. In their trash costumes they look like mythical creatures, Klingon superheroes. They correspond to the “five best friends” who form the second basic strand in Ben Yishai’s text. Five girls who dream of their life by the side of their dream man in a grandma’s café. In doing so, they reproduce the age-old role models of the small, thin woman at the side of the much taller, older, stronger man with the broad chest to lean on, all the internalized gender stereotypes and behaviors that then permeate into their sex and married life. Bekim Latifi has a bravura number thanked with applause when he throws out the demands that are made on him as a man in grotesque excessive demands (“Make me pregnant! Go and fight for me! Finance me!”).
Following the example of the American Lorena Bobbitt, who once cut off the penis of her rapist husband, Ben Yishai plays out a castration fantasy at the end of her text – with the utopia of rotting the genitals as pars per toto and a busload full of patriarchal, heteronormative gender clichés to let the abyss race. Similar to “Thelma & Louise”. A cinema fantasy, “Tarantino-Style”. The author authorizes herself to be an “inglorious poet”. With Karabulut, it’s all much better and sweeter. Ruched up with foam tentacles, additional links and felt jags, the five actors mutate into hybrid creatures. And then they take off in a glittering space ship. Instead of hell – an ascension.