Word has got around that Munich has a new theater. In order to trigger a little more envy nationwide: It is architecturally a darling, technically at the most sophisticated level and simply beautiful in its presence. So that is not also very beautiful Isarphilharmonie meant, that is, the interim quarters of the Munich Philharmonic that opened last week for the period of the renovation of the Gasteig. What is meant is the splendid new building of the Munich Volkstheater in the Schlachthofviertel, a building that is urban in the most modern, inviting sense and in which – almost – everything has been implemented that the artistic director Christian Stückl and his technical manager Carsten Lück had fed in and requested from many years of experience. A make a wish theater for 131 million euros, already celebrated as a “miracle” in this feature section. At the weekend it opened with two premieres: Christopher Marlowe’s “Edward II.” Directed by the landlord, followed by a piece of research on the subject of the slaughterhouse, meat consumption and animal welfare by Jessica Glause.
When would you have ever been present at the opening of a completely new theater building? The mood on the inauguration evening with a lot of political and cultural celebrities is downright euphoric, the emotion stimulation through the beautifully colored and shapely building is joined by the joy of reunion after more than one and a half years of Corona. 3G plus enables a maskless crowd without a gap, that feels forbidden good. More or less they all recognize each other. Hearts flew at the opening speeches by Lord Mayor Dieter Reiter, who was sunning himself in the glitz of culture, and the frenetically celebrated theater fighter Stückl. The 600-seat stalls of the big stage – there is still a medium-sized and a small one – was charged Feng Shui with such positive energy and such a high frequency of applause that, if it holds up, nothing can go wrong .
Stückl doesn’t play it safe
Unless you expect Christian Stückl to reinvent himself as a director in his new house and suddenly instead of a real, politically based narrative theater, a wild, avant-garde deconstruction and performance theater, his opening staging will absolutely meet the expectations and demands. The choice of plays, Christopher Marlowe’s royal drama “Edward II”, written around 1592, is headstrong and deserves respect for the simple reason that the head of the Volkstheater is not playing it safe with it and is not joking with the audience. He could have made it easier for himself with a crowdpleaser from Shakespeare. But Stückl has a message, he wants to make a statement with the piece against the homophobia negotiated in it. Above all, the church, which has always been a main subject in the work of the Oberammergau Passion director, is getting its fat off again. And last but not least, this theater, with all the conventionality of its well-behaved appearance-exit structure, is aimed at a young audience that may still be gendered and sexually self-orientated.
“Let me rest in your heart and be enemies with the whole world”: Edward II. (Jan Meeno Jürgens, left) and his lover Gaveston (Alexandros Koutsoulis).
(Photo: Arno Declair)
The young ensemble, some of whom have recently been cast from drama school, certainly contributes to this. Here, too, the energy of the new. One might think that Stückl’s handsome boys – “Edward II.” is a male piece, and there is no cross-gender cast at Stückl – to be presented in full body as soon as they step out of the bathtub. But that is also made with relish and fun, and both Jan Meeno Jürgens in the title role (with gorgeous curls reminiscent of the Kini Ludwig II) and his favorite and lover Gaveston (the Alexandros Koutsoulis with lascivious borrowings from art stars like Andy Warhol and David Bowie meanders) have charm. And potential. Even if you still notice the lack of playing and speaking experience in them and you shouldn’t expect the depth of your characters to be explored now.
Edward II of England – he was in power from 1307 to 1327 – is a sensual young king who is not interested in the affairs of war and state, who instead has fun with the “seductive French” Gaveston, whom he idolizes. This is already described in Raphael Holinshed’s “Chronicles”, to which Marlowe referred when writing his docufictional piece. The king’s homoerotic lotter life makes the peers at his court and the Archbishop of Canterbury as a representative of spiritual power (played deeply intelligently by the reliable Pascal Fligg) extremely nervous, which can still be understood in view of the threatened borders and an impending civil war. But that soon turns into a willingness to use violence up to and including murder – not out of sheer reason of state, as they pretend, but out of the worst homophobia that erupts in wild hatred.
Stückl gives his empathic staging an offensive paint job in the signal color pink. The light, the make-up, all the costumes, whether uniform, blouson, tulle dress or tuxedo, everything is kept in the same shrill hue, which communicatively transports the gay-lesbian-transsexual: shocking pink. A world in black and purple-pink, decorated by Stefan Hageneier, who built the stage as always: a circling labyrinthine frame made of neon-lit door frames and bars, which allows a lot of draft into the black void and sometimes brings a pink throne, sometimes a super-foam bathtub to the front . The new revolving stage with its gigantic diameter of 14.80 meters, designed like a spider web made of fluorescent tubes, is used very effectively.
One shudders even without blood
How Stückl literally gets his staging to work in this setting is as skillful as it is worth seeing, even if everything is delivered in a very straightforward manner in the narrative. What many appreciate precisely because of this: Here you get a piece told in an understandable way and yet not old-fashioned, but with modernized figures and today’s sprinkles (“You self-in love asshole”). Where the “understandable” did not necessarily apply to the acoustics. In any case, there was so much text that couldn’t be understood in the back rows that it was a big topic at the premiere party. Was it up to the speaker, or could it be that the room is not bearing?
In any case, the actors all get enough space in Stückl’s staging, a type pushing for power with cold-blooded brutal flair like Mortimer (Silas Breiding) as well as the little servant Spencer (Julian Gutmann), that’s nice. Stückl gives the characters time to look, stand still and think aloud. Liv Stapelfeldt’s Isabella, the only woman in this man’s world, asserts herself as the capricious pose queen, and a special role is played by the little boy who plays Edward’s son (Theodor Junghans), visually a revenant of his soft, melancholy father; But how this child, shaped by violence and intrigues, then opens up new pages as heir to the throne, is Stückl’s blow in the pit of the stomach of society.
Animals stare at you: cow, horse, dog, pig and goat in the play “Our Meat, Our Blood” by Jessica Glause
(Photo: Arno Declair)
“Our meat, our blood”, the second premiere on the smaller stage 2, is due to the location of the Volkstheater in the Schlachthofviertel. The animals that are being killed and processed in the neighborhood can sometimes be heard screaming in the neighborhood. Their stench, it is said, wafts through the air. The director Jessica Glause went on research and conducted interviews with farmers, butchers and other people from meat production. Together with her five-person ensemble and the live musician Joe Masi, she has developed a piece from it that is more than just a mere mess of material. Namely, playful infotainment on the subject of meat consumption, which astonishingly dispenses with bad video images from the slaughtering factories (which then play out in their heads all by themselves) and instead lets the animals themselves have their say.
The actors not only play human prototypes of the production chain that leads from animal breeding to schnitzel on the plate. But they are also an animal with original masks over their faces, grunting, mooing, neighing and chewing their cuds in an animal-like manner and jump around great. Jakob Immervoll gives the skilled Bavarian butcher from the family business that has risen to money and Wiesnwirt fame, and at the same time the splendid pig, which at the end, smeared with dough and topped with parsley, perishes with a dramatic twitch of death in a steel ring of death. Maral Keshavarz and Anne Stein are farmers on the verge of burnout, but also goats and cows. Mara Widmann groans as an overwhelmed vet and singing horse, and Jonathan Müller has a special position not only as a noble chef, but also as a pet dog. The whole thing is not white sausage bashing from a radical vegan attitude, but a complex all-round view, prepared with vocal interludes and a lot of humor – in a way appropriate to the species for an audience that does not want to spoil the Leberkäs completely. The evening is enough to think about even without blood. Applause!