Nikolai Erdman’s “Suicide” at the Munich Volkstheater – Culture

When a piece is called “The Suicide” and at the beginning of the performance a nun with a large, white grand piano stands in the doorway and sings a cool, loud song in Russian, then you suspect that the evening will be rather strange. Nikolai Erdman wrote his play in 1928, did not have much fun in his Russian homeland during his life, was interned and exiled. “The Suicide” had its first performance in the Soviet empire in 1982; Now it is to continue the success story of the new Volkstheater in Munich, which opened three weeks ago.

Claudia Bossard stages a fast-paced, wonderfully weird revue that initially looks as if Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Mikhail Bulgakov and Vladimir Sorokin had founded a writers’ flat, to which they invited a few systems theorists to discuss the nature of becoming superfluous. Naturally highly educated in Russia, Heinrich von Kleist’s double suicide at Wannsee, for example, plays an important role, especially his suicide note. In general, the whole evening is a puzzle of literary references that are thrown around the ears by a highly motivated ensemble, supported by the two musicians Alice Peterhans and Anna Tropper-Lener, who are at home in many styles, including classical, and by some of the players get supported. A highlight: Nina Steils, so gifted in Bavarian, as if she were recommending herself for a complete performance of all of Martin Sperr’s pieces, sings ravishingly “I wui nur zruck zu dir” by Nickerbocker and Biene, just at the moment when you think you are missing only the “Big, Black Bird” by Ludwig Hirsch.

The costumes of Andy Visiting have as many small holes as the dramaturgy of the evening, which doesn’t bother us. Asche on the stage, a few parts of the house and an old BMW, put down by Elisabeth Weiß, and people who at first look like they are at a Halloween party and who soon all together found a kingdom of half-dead, in which Hamlet meets Ophelia and Napoleon.

It’s all extremely funny, but of course very bad at the core. Semjon, played by the lovely Lorenz Hochhuth, is unemployed, superfluous and would kill himself if he could think of a satisfactory staging of his death. But he doesn’t even know what to wear at his funeral. But that’s not how you get anywhere in a world where everything is public. That saves him.

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