They are fascinating: the circles of light that float through black space and fog, first one, then more and more, sometimes they lie over the action, then they tilt into the vertical, move towards each other, overlap, overlap. They look like beings from another galaxy who have come to speak to us, but not with words or gestures, but with their graceful dance and changing light. Sometimes they shine in glistening white, then in azure blue, orange, blood red and thus already indicate an event that begins badly and ends in tragedy.
Some make pilgrimages to Ulrich Rasche’s theater evenings as if to a good techno club
It will be performed at the Deutsches Theater Berlin Oedipus by Sophocles in a transmission by Friedrich Hölderlin, by none other than Ulrich Rasche, on whose evenings some people make a pilgrimage like others to a good techno club. Because they allow themselves to be put into a trance-like state by his machine theater and thus want to reach deeper layers of consciousness than would be possible in our hyper-fragmented everyday life.
After the Sarah Kane play “4.48 Psychosis”, “Oedipus” is Rapid’s second production at the house and a homage to the ancient theater of Dionysus, which was both a religious place of worship and a self-assurance of early democracy. Here the tragedy of a man who, because of a curse from the gods, first ignorantly kills his father and then ignorantly marries his mother, was performed for the first time.
Oedipus is looking for a perpetrator who is ultimately himself
That well-known myth is the basis for Sophocles’ investigation of rule and responsibility, freedom, fate and guilt. The action begins when the plague rages in the city of Thebes, where Oedipus was made ruler after his victory over the Sphinx, and he is now desperately looking for a cause for the waning. The oracle gives an answer that can mean many things. Oedipus, however, interprets it to mean that the misery is man-made, i.e. comes from the murder of the former ruler, whose perpetrator has still not been found. And so, in spite of all the resistance of his subordinates, he goes in search of this perpetrator, who in the end is himself.
It is a stubborn, compulsive search that leads away from dealing with the plague and becomes the selfish self-tearing of a man who at some point only sees traitors around him who want to disempower him. This decline, which has been mentioned countless times, is now also seen in Rasche, but in a form torn from overly mundane contexts, as it could have been practiced in ancient Greece. With artificial choreographies and instrumental music that are only there to transport this ancient-sounding text directly into the body, where it reverberates like the whisper of a bad dream.
The turntable rotates almost silently in an anti-clockwise direction. It is the gentle but relentless countercurrent to which all nine actors are exposed this evening, but they take a slow, even stoic approach to it. They wear long black skirts selected by Clemens Leander, strapless camisoles or transparent long sleeves that wrap around their flawless, athletic bodies like a mourning corset.
The performers are not so much characters as they are carriers of a language that is rhythmic and artificial. The language follows the rhythm of the steps, the music. It seems as if it is being pressed out under great suffering, every word is an act of strength followed by another.
Rapid staging seems strangely timeless – but timelessness is its strength
They are always in motion, but they do not move naturally. She holds her arms strangely apart, because there are no props that could be grasped, no sentences that could be given more meaning with a sweeping hand movement. The hands are only used once when Manuel Harder, who plays Oedipus, tries to strangle his former advisor and supposed enemy Creon alias Elias Arens, but this gesture is only hinted at.
Seriousness or pop culture allusion? Manuel Harder as Oedipus.
(Photo: Martin Müller / imago images)
Harder plays his Oedipus with great force, which he puts, and must put, above all in his voice. The razor-sharp S-sounds are of an aggressiveness that moves within a narrow range. So it happens that the meandering thoughts whisk you away from this poorly referenced space, which commands holy seriousness, into pop-cultural, more ironic realms. Images of the “Highlander” creep in and other things, and then the evening turns into parody.
Rapid staging seems strangely timeless in a time when the world seems to be going under again, and this timelessness is also its strength. Because the way Rasche presents the original material, you are thrown back to your core, on a person who cannot escape his fate, no matter how hard he tries.
If the overly realistic creeps in, the staging flattens out
There are many interpretations of this myth. And of course you could now put everything possible in Rasches version, i.e. equate the plague with the coronavirus, as the program booklet did, or his decision to cast the blind seer Teiresias with a woman who keeps Oedipus his own blindness in mind, understand as a statement that an accomplice cannot end patriarchy without abolishing himself. But that would be far too clear for an evening that wants to appeal to the subconscious. And so the staging always flattens ugly as soon as the overly realistic creeps in, when the conflicts slide into the scenic despite all the abstraction.
But then in the three hours she always finds her way back to her real strength, which lies in the enormous pull of the powerful voice of the choir. Like almost the entire evening, it is also accompanied by the sounds composed by Nico van Wersch of a four-piece music ensemble, which plays string and plucked instruments, percussion and synthesizers live in the orchestra pit and thus creates an epoch-making sound that can be heard in the best moments a feeling of unearthly, all-purifying happiness discharges.