There is a huge crash in the Salzburg State Theater. A piece of plaster falls from the portal. It’s dusty. The curtain opens shyly, one looks at a rubble field of hollow concrete blocks, the actor André Jung comes from the side. He looks at the destruction for a long time, picks up a fallen headlight that doesn’t work, he throws it away. For a moment Jung seems like the caretaker of the theater, but he is the spirit of the performance, which is almost too prosaic to call a performance. Because with Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s “Das Bergwerk zu Falun”, the director Jossi Wieler invents a poem for the stage that can only be experienced at the Salzburg Festival.
It was a very good idea by Jossi Wieler that he handed over the management of the Stuttgart State Opera in 2018. Maybe not necessarily good for the State Opera, but for the theater. Wieler, who celebrated his 70th birthday the day before the Salzburg premiere, was in-house director in Basel, at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg, at the Münchner Kammerspiele, and had already staged a number of operas before he took over the Stuttgart Opera in 2011. Four of his productions were invited to the Theatertreffen, and his work was repeated in the polls of Theater today and the magazine Opera world chosen for the performances of the year. And now, freed from the burden of directorship, he can do what he didn’t have time for: spoken theater.
In autumn of last year he made his debut at the Deutsches Theater Berlin with Peter Handke’s “Zdeněk Adamec”, he staged some texts by Elfriede Jelinek, who also wrote a meandering essay for the program, he devoted himself to such miraculously surreal texts as Leonora Carrington’s “Fest des Lamb “. Wieler would never bring a piece on stage that you can simply staging down like that. He loves searching, the unknown, the inner world behind the words. And here he meets with Hofmannsthal.
The dramaturge Marion Tiedtke took the text and threw half out
The most famous version of the “Falun” story comes from ETA Hoffmann and is 80 years older than Hofmannsthal’s play. He wrote it in 1899 with good knowledge of Hoffmann’s story, and then worked on it for even longer; It was only published posthumously, it was premiered later, in 1949 in Konstanz, after which it was not performed many times. It is long, it is thoroughly confused, it celebrates the counter-image to a reality that has been thoroughly rationalized and freed from secrets. And it’s rhyming, not always happy. A widow’s complaint: “Mine wanted to sell me / and drink up my money / then I ran away.”
The dramaturge Marion Tiedtke took the text, threw half out and put in a fairy tale by Johann Peter Hebel, which revolves around the same subject and appeared in 1811. In it, Hebel describes the passage of time using a chain of historical events, with many rulers and many wars, seven years of age or longer, Napoleon or Maria Theresa. In the performance, the unique Hildegard Schmahl extends the list further, world wars, Hitler, a circular litany.
This is what it’s all about: The seaman Elis returns home from a trip to India, finds his mother dead, is now alone in the world and he is tired. The old Torbern – the wonderful spirit André Jung – promises him luck in mining, and below the world Elis meets the mountain queen and the young man Agmahd, with whom he was once connected as if they were “bride and groom”, but who died at sea . Upstairs, in Falun, Anna loves Elis, her father, Pehrson Dahlsjö, for whom Elis goes to the mountain, wants to marry the two, but there is longing and pain in Elis, who wants to go down again to the queen’s kingdom, where you don’t know the time. Elis does not return, the undead Torbern can finally die. In the story, after 50 years, the not decayed corpse of Elis is discovered, and the now old Anna dies over it; In the performance the curtain closes behind Lea Ruckpaul, Anna is left alone.
The figures awaken from the rubble and the dust and find each other in alternating encounters
Jossi Wieler has composed an ensemble of six actors who, despite their individuality, are united in their wonderful handling of this language that is ostensibly out of date, which they present and present, with just enough mannerism that it sounds and sings. Together they are busy building a world out of the rubble, the turntable circles, a wall ring is created, which Torbern tears down again at the end. Music (Lars Wittershagen) blows in from a distance, but actually the words are the music.
At the beginning the figures wake up from the rubble and dust, find each other in alternating encounters, Elis meets Ilsebill, with whom there was a time together, and Hildegard Schmahl turns irritably seductive into a young woman. Edmund Telgenkämper first plays a fisherman and then Dahlsjö, i.e. the characters who are most likely to face reality, but he too illuminates them with a groping, exciting skepticism when speaking. Sylvana Krappatsch is the mountain queen and the appearance of the boy Agmahd, essentially hard to grasp, promise, curse.
And then there is love. The love of Anna for Elis, of this girl played by Lea Ruckpaul with captivating clarity, who has a poetry without any whisper. It would actually be the crystal that Elis is looking for in the mountain, but he hardly gets it, because even with Hoffmann, people are always in the place they don’t belong and want to be somewhere else, which they can’t find because that’s what they are Not in reality anywhere else.
The way Marcel Kohler plays the Elis, you don’t have a lot of confidence that he can find happiness. Kohler is huge and extremely tender. You have to think a little of Robert Smith, the singer of the band The Cure, big, dark angel he too. Kohler is just 30 years old and already has so much in him. He can play a sinew, and when he hugs Lea Ruckpaul from behind, clasps her and arches her, she becomes even more delicate and he even bigger, and he is like a great fool that cannot hold what he wants to hold. And that is also an explanation of the world that one does not have to feel, analyze.