It was the writer Peter Weiss who in 1964 had the brilliant idea of dealing with the French Revolution in an asylum. “The persecution and murder of Jean Paul Marat portrayed by the drama group of the Charenton hospice under the guidance of Mr. de Sade”: The play was as good as its title, which was not least due to the clarity of the experimental arrangement. Here the revolutionary Marat in his famous bathtub, embodied by a mentally disturbed person, there as the game director the real Marquis de Sade. Their passionate discourses, interrupted again and again by an angry clinic boss, have gone down in theater history.
Robert Borgmann, who calls his theater evening “Passion I and II” based on Michail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita”, has probably envisioned a similar spectacle, which is why he makes the mistake of quoting Weiss’ title at the beginning. Here it is the story of the Passion of Jesus that is re-enacted by the mentally ill, albeit in the alienating version of Bulgakov. Its version, pointed to the conflict between Yeshua (Jesus) and the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, crosses itself in the novel with scenes from Moscow in the 1920s and autobiographical sprinkles – the “master” is Bulgakov himself. His novel, of course, was subject to Stalinist censorship no chance, it was only published posthumously in 1966/67 and promptly became a literary sensation.
It is best to cover your ears with the Bach verses sung
Psychiatry also plays a role in Bulgakov: the master retires to a clinic, and it is his lover Margarita who will track him down there. That one of the main characters in his work in progress the devil is, not in the playful version of a Mephisto, but as Satan himself, is probably one of the reasons that one thinks the master is a bit weird. This highly ambitious Robert Borgmann theater evening in Bochum is sung, but these are not, as with Peter Weiss, petty songs, but nothing less than Johann Sebastian Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. At the side of the stage portal is a small organ, and when the clinically white clad players sing a few Bach verses full of unctuousness, which they apparently find funny, it is best to cover your ears.
Is that Borgmann’s sheer seriousness? Or is it his understanding of Master Bulgakov’s parodic techniques that he is now transferring to the stage with some hesitation? According to the motto: What is right for the master is cheap for the genius director? There are definitely gripping scenes on this packed evening of theater (direction, stage, music: Robert Borgmann). For example, when Steven Scharf as Pontius Pilate and Pierre Bokma as the devil or as the head of the secret service meet, two wonderful actors. Scharf, who occasionally balances his strong physique with a casual understatement, hits the kettle here now and then, but gently and well-dosed, so to speak. Someone knows what he’s doing. Pilate sympathizes with Jesus, the “foolish philosopher”, but he cannot show it so directly. Scharf finds the right (winding) tones for this ambivalence, and Bokma, who confidently presents the devil’s sarcasm with his beautiful French accent, is a straightforward counterpart.
Art for art’s sake – the idea behind it is not visible
After the break, Borgmann tidies up the stage. Instead of the psychiatric scene with a prompter in the double role of the key-swinging clinic nurse, we now see an empty room on a pedestal: Gina Haller, another excellent player in this ensemble, which is blessed with excellent players, has to groan and pull around on ropes in a circle. Haller is margarita, and the master margarita story is now dealt with at what feels like a different temperature, without being able to state precisely what makes the difference and what it aims to do. There is no longer any singing, instead Haller has a longer monologue, which is clapped with music in such a way that you can almost only understand individual stimulus words such as “racist”, “sexist” and the like. Surely this statement would have been signed without further ado.
The program quotes Bulgakov’s sister-in-law as saying that she cannot yet see the main line in the novel. It may be that it only becomes apparent when you carefully read the 500-page work. The theater maker Robert Borgmann has a lot of ambition and a thousand ideas, but the idea behind it is not visible. The Bochum theater plays the l’art-pour-l’art blues.