Salzburg Festival: Premiere “Crazy for Consolation” – Culture

Thorsten Lensing is a solitaire among the directors, a loner who works independently, independently of the German municipal theatre. If he creates a new production every few years, with a lot of time and meticulousness, then he drums together actors and actresses he trusts for it, not just any old ones, but first-class ones for him – the core has been the same for many years – and works with them on a theater of immediacy. This is usually a great success, like “The Brothers Karamazov” (2014) based on Dostoyevsky or the adaptation “Infinite Fun” (2018) based on the novel by David Foster Wallace, which was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen. The director nurtures the theatrical guru-like aura of suspected genius that surrounds him and his work by making himself scarce and enthroning his actors, whom he apparently frees more to play than to command and direct them. They thank him with loyalty and unconditional commitment.

Now Lensing has drummed again – and for the first time wrote a play himself for four of his favorite actors: Ursina Lardi, Devid Striesow, Sebastian Blomberg and André Jung are the formidable protagonists in “Verrückt nach Trost”, premiered at the Salzburg Festival in the Mozarteum University (because the State Theater is being renovated). The loosely connected sequence of scenes is a co-production with the Sophiensäle in Berlin, Kampnagel Hamburg and five other theaters. It is about no small questions. where we come from What makes us human. Why we are the way we are. all that.

You shouldn’t expect a piece with psychologically sophisticated characters and a stringent plot, even if the beginning still gives the impression. It begins with the siblings Charlotte and Felix, ten and eleven years old, played by Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow with a childish, childlike exhilaration, she is always a touch smarter, more reasonable, he is a red-cheeked goblin. They are by the sea, on the beach where they used to be with their parents. But they died, and now the children are bringing them to life, imitating mum and dad: how the two, an apparently great couple, rub cream on each other, massage and tease each other, how he praises her “ass” and she cuts his toenails. And as they say about the son: “Optically, he doesn’t tear anything.” Which would set the evening’s cheerful-melancholic tone: death is always there or threatening somewhere, and Lensing’s theater always comes to terms with it with tenderness and comedy. It’s a bit silly at first, but it’s becoming increasingly touching.

What Lensing does is pure theatre: pretending

It’s Charlotte, so Lardi, who gets out of the child’s game with a definitive “I don’t want any more.” Which is synonymous with growing up, because: “Without parents we are no longer children.” They now have to look for something like consolation elsewhere, it will always be in the encounter with someone opposite, be it human or animal. The three-and-a-half-hour evening – which doesn’t feel short either – tells the story in an episodic sequence, which at the beginning still has the character of a number and is therefore somewhat arbitrary. You have to warm up to it first. As always with Lensing, the game is played in an abstract space without a lot of extras. Into this, the architects Gordian Blumenthal and Ramun Capaul have built a huge steel cylinder that fills the entire width of the stage. A cold, unwelcoming thing that immediately gives gas pipeline nightmares. More of an obstacle wall for the ensemble. But of course no problem for these top actors. Anyway, everything here is designed so that they are the ones who shine. That they are the ones that create images and spaces in the mind. What Lensing does is pure theatre. Very simple and original: adapt a role. assert something. Just like children play. Pretend.

Hence the animal roles in the play. They are great acting fodder. But they also bring a different perspective and thus a very special magic into play. It’s great how André Jung as a (mute) orangutan opens up another existential dimension simply through his stare and monkey gestures. Who needs a monkey costume! And when Sebastian Blomberg slowly crawls across the stage on all fours as a wobbly-headed turtle, he also gives the play another (living) character trace. Ursina Lardis Charlotte, the declared lone fighter, will finally transform herself into a talking octopus with agile, graceful arm and leg work, a particularly intelligent animal and, in the case of Lardi, also particularly enchanting. “Nine brains, eight arms, three hearts,” and still not happy. And dead after four years.

Open detailed view

One through ball follows the other for the actors

All sorts of absurd things happen in “Crazy for Consolation” because the piece follows the logic of a dream more than a dramatic narration. Some scenes are actually declared as dreams, so you can spin around even more. The animals are creatures of it, but also, for example, the babbling baby that Devid Striesow tucks under his hooded bath towel with inimitable rosiness. Until he finally screams like crazy, while Ursina Lardi and Sebastin Blomberg play a callous couple in Zoff who totally neglect the little one.

So one steep template for the actors follows the other. Sebastian Blomberg shines as a suicidal diver plagued by the hustle and bustle of life and makes the audience laugh with wife jokes that you thought were out of the question (“My wife forgot to leave me”). He then gets into very nice conversation with the octopus and would like to be killed by him. The ambitious text is, despite all the tangible comedy – lively sayings, blooming neuroses – an extremely allusive and evocative web. Threads that are laid out in the first part are picked up again later. So we meet Felix (Striesow) again, who hasn’t felt anything since the death of his parents, but is a very good kisser and has the best sentences (“As a child, I could feel God like the weather”). He is in a relationship with a sensitive man, played by André Jung, to whom he recites various weather conditions like a poem in an enchanting monologue.

In any case, the evening intensifies in the second part, both humanly and dialogically, and then no longer just seems like the red carpet for the artistry of its protagonists. In the final scene, Ursina Lardi is Charlotte again. But now claimed 88 years old. She is enthroned on a perch close to the ramp, all by herself, peaceful and clear. At her side: her caregiver kissing her, completely concerned with her happiness – a robot in the most human form of André Jung. Which you want to book immediately in all its magic. Empathy is now in the room. And consolation: “Everyone will be redeemed,” promises Lardi, looking at the audience.