At the beginning of this year, the actor Ron Iyamu raised serious allegations against the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. He had seen racism there for two and a half years and no one had done anything about it, Iyamu said. This sparked a nationwide debate about institutional racism; The Schauspielhaus engaged a consulting firm from Berlin to identify internal structural problems in the house. Employees should be sensitized in anti-discrimination workshops.
Against this background, the premiere of the stage version of “Identitti”, the widely acclaimed debut novel by the cultural scientist and author Mithu Sanyal, took place at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. The focus of the book is the dispute over the alleged Indian Saraswati, who named herself after the Hindu goddess of wisdom. She teaches intercultural studies and postcolonial theory at Düsseldorf’s Heinrich Heine University, says things like: “Color is a category of oppression”, and expels white students from the classroom so that they can learn what it is like to be ostracized. For the novel protagonist Nivedita, like Sanyal the daughter of an Indian father and a Polish mother, Saraswati is an idol. Until it turns out that the professor’s real name is Sarah Vera Thielmann and that her identity is just – yes what? Has adapted? Conquered? Or did she, as she herself says, “break the grid as a race terrorist”?
The stage version is also by Mithu Sanyal. The prerequisites are excellent insofar as the location, the prehistory of the theater and the topic charge the production with a local and supraregional relevance that other productions can only dream of.
Kali, the goddess of revenge, is played by Serkan Kaya with a Smurf-blue face
Director Kieran Joel lifts the whole thing to the meta level right from the start by having Cennet Rüya Voss, who plays Nivedita, explain the background of the play from the off in a WDR interview. All debates are always taken into account here, this signals that we are aware of every possible top view. In the background, social media messages run through the set like a digital waterfall, which consists of a mixture of Nivedita’s student apartment and Saraswati’s sophisticated living room. As in the novel, Nivedita has dialogues with the Indian goddess of revenge, Kali. It is cool “because it is on top during sex” and is played by Serkan Kaya with a Smurf-blue face as a vain, generally pretty good-humored superego.
The senses are never under-challenged: either Nivedita argues with her ex-boyfriend Simon, for example, who, as a white Cis-man, gropes in all imaginable identity-political faux pas, or with the particularly committed Saraswati hater Oluchi. Or it is celebrated with champagne and the cousin Priti, who grew up in England and is both sexually and ethnically far more to herself than Nivedita himself. Cennet Rüya Voss portrays the protagonist with a devotion that sometimes goes against the inauthenticity of the staging approach seems to struggle.
In the background of the stage, social media messages run like a digital waterfall through the stage set, which consists of a mixture of Nivedita’s student apartment and Saraswati’s sophisticated living room.
(Photo: Sandra Then)
If you declare theater as a lie – really not a fresh approach – then you draw in a safeguard that makes it easier for everyone involved to distance themselves from what they are showing at any time. In Düsseldorf, this takes on downright moving forms when, for example, Mehdi Moinzadeh steps out of his role as a cameraman, Nivedita lights an invisible cigarette in a pantomime and also points out that “everything is just theater”.
The multiple refraction of the art form also seems to make it more difficult for the director to pursue a comprehensible line of cast, except that he has tried to put together an ensemble of actors with a migration background (or with “migration foreground”, as it is called in the play). So it doesn’t seem elegant to point out that Fnot Tadesse not only plays the black activist Oluchi, as it were, but also the white bourgeois daughter Lotte. Or that when Kali Nivedita wanted to see through the eyes of an “old white man”, Cennet Rüya Voss was actually exchanged for an old white man for a minute. A theater that knows how to make use of its means and abilities would manage this interplay without footnotes, without temporary reshuffle, and yet understandably. Color blind casting by the way, is this called on English-speaking stages, it has been commonplace for decades.
This indecision, which possibly corresponds to the desire to protect oneself in the face of the controversial topic, is particularly evident in the solution to which Joel has decided on the character of Saraswati: he casts her twice, with Friederike Wagner in a blond one and with Leila Abdullah a dark-haired version. Both are always on stage at the same time, speaking alternately, sometimes over and over, always lecturing in the same way. This in no way illuminates the difficulties with Saraswati’s alleged or actual identity theft, it just seems redundant.
At its core, “Identitti” is a gigantic discourse. Without a doubt someone who by no means circumvents the complexity of the issues of ethnic identity and racism. But it is precisely the seriousness with which these are approached – for example the lack of a separate language beyond imported terms from the US debates, the lack of place for people with parents of different origins and ethnicity, the question of why gender can be fluid, but ethnic identity not – rubs against the determined silliness of much of the staging.
The last scenes, in which Sarah Vera Thielmann’s decision to pretend to be Indian, is surprisingly conventionally and psychologically resolved, despite all the previous distancing work, fail to completely avoid crossing the border to emotional kitsch. When Nivedita asks everyone in front of a gigantic, anatomically correct plastic heart at the end: “Let love flow like a river“One wonders how this evening should have earned the love so demanded.