You have to be a bit careful now, because the matter is complicated. So: You sit in front of a room in the Waldhotel Davos. As you will soon see, it is equipped as it was when the hotel was still the sanatorium where Katia Mann took a cure in 1912, her husband Thomas visited her and made the many observations from which he wrote his novel “The Magic Mountain”. built. He then played on the Schatzalp, 300 meters higher. But you are down here. A friendly helper equipped the visitor with earphones and a receiver. You sit there, immerse yourself in an acoustic world and hear a voice from the room that asks you to come in. The voice belongs to Hans Castorp, the main character of the novel.
Inside you see a sparsely furnished room. There’s a hat like his on the bedside table Thomas Mann liked wearing, and one VR glasses. A doll sits opposite, thick woolen clothes stick out from under the bathrobe, the head is a ball camera. The doll is Castorp. She talks to you in an irritatingly natural way, as if you were Thomas Mann. So the creator of the character, who you are yourself in this moment, meets his invention. Castorp admires Mann (that is, the visitor) with somewhat unwilling deference. Then you put on the VR glasses, look down on yourself, wear the clothes of the Castorp doll – and see yourself coming in. So the first conversation served to produce the 360-degree film in which you now see yourself. In your head you talk to yourself, you are now a man and Castorp at the same time, the new words match amazingly the facial expressions that you were previously made to use. It’s a perfect magic game. You observe yourself as if you were a stranger.
This masterpiece must become a reference for how to use VR glasses in or as a theatre
Then you disappear into the glasses yourself and Thomas Mann now appears in this virtual reality of the film projected into the glasses, portrayed by the wonderful Peter Jecklin. You look around with the VR glasses. The room is now a bit neglected, leaves are lying around. One has apparently been forgotten as Castorp. And old Thomas Mann, who takes off his hat for the hat that is already lying there, is dissatisfied with the state of his creation. He wants her to live again, leave for the outside. One likes to do that, already felt close to one’s own oblivion. You take off your glasses, leave the room, and in the corner of your eye you see: There are two hats lying on top of each other.
Bernhard Mikeska and his magic troop from space+time have invented this masterpiece after many fascinating one-to-one theatrical works, which must become a reference for how to use VR glasses in or as a theatre. In recent years, this technology has been encountered more often, but mostly in such a way that it could be replaced by a video projection. The Augsburg Theater sent glasses to the audience at home during the lockdown, which contained the all-round film of a performance. One was amazed, but remained the distanced observer.
Although Lothar Kittstein’s text condenses years of dealing with Thomas Mann in a few sentences, “Im Zauberberg” is ultimately about something else. Mann invented many characters who lived what he could not live. At the end of August there is a second part in the Waldhaus in Sils, where he meets his son Klaus, who also lived in a way man never dared to. From this motif arises the total confrontation of the visitor with himself, his own dreams, desires, longings up to thinking about his own death. That’s totally insane, terrific.