“I’ll show you how to live,” says the grandmother to her grandchildren. The twins had no idea that their mother still had a mother herself until they were sent to the old woman. A small and skinny woman with a wrinkled face who never washes, does not change her clothes, pees standing up and wipes the leftover food in the corners of her mouth in her black headscarf.
A woman who is called a witch by the people and who calls her grandchildren dog sons. Which is tough on herself and on others. That’s the only way she got through her life, that’s the only way, she thinks, that she will survive this war. Because of the fighting, the boys are with her; in the big city, with my mother, it would be too dangerous. The father is at the front.
Showing how to live, by that grandmother understands: learning how to get along on your own. The tone of Ágota Kristóf’s novel is terse and sparse and harsh like the story The big booklet from 1986. A few years after its publication, it was staged as a radio play. Erik Altorfer is now rediscovering him for radio in a co-production by Deutschlandfunk, Hessischer Rundfunk and Swiss radio.
Libgart Schwarz and Kristof van Boven speak with seductive demure
The director has radically reduced the ensemble to just two actors: Libgart Schwarz from the Vienna Burgtheater as a grandmother and in the children’s roles Kristof Van Boven, who was at the Münchner Kammerspiele for a while before moving to the Thalia Theater in Hamburg – both appear very rarely Radio plays on. Their performance is exceptional because the brittleness in their voices is always seductive. And because her speaking is woven into Martin Schütz’s composition, which is primarily rhythmic and hardly melodic, demanding and relentlessly propelling. Schwarz and Van Boven sometimes go along with them, but they also keep spreading against this flow.
The story is one of self-discipline that leads to brutalization. The twins insult each other for half an hour a day in order to harden themselves against the constant degradation. They learn to steal, they learn to kill. Develop their own moral concepts, are sexualized in a crude way. Sometimes it is not Kristof Van Bofen but Libgart Schwarz that can be heard in the role of children – a beautiful staging idea that makes clear the hopeless tradition in which these people are.
The big issue, DLF, September 18, 2021, 8:05 p.m. HR 2, September 26, 10 p.m.