“The Tower” at the Munich Residenz Theater – culture

Right from the first spotlight, the war is in space. The four mud-colored figures that stand prominently in the spotlight seem straight out of the trenches of Ukraine, disabled privates, their gaze as blank as their tone of voice, their rubber coats and uniforms smeared with mud. That’s a strong image to begin with, despite the fact that you only understand a few catchphrases of what they say. Smuggled weapons “up from Hungary, down from Lithuania”, “red rooster on the roof”, a “poor man’s king” who will come. The language they speak is a special Hofmannsthal German, slightly antiquated and historicizing, overall bulky and not very fluent, as the six actors involved will demonstrate on this evening in Munich’s Residenztheater. Some do better with it, others worse. In any case, the foundling text does not experience a revitalizing infusion in terms of expression and interpretation, that has already been said in advance.

Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s very ambitious, rarely performed tragedy “Der Turm” is performed, in which the Austrian playwright adapted baroque material with great theatrical aplomb: Calderón de la Barca’s play “Life is a Dream” from 1636. King Basilius, regent of a Kingdom of Poland, which belongs to “more legend than history”, holds his son Sigismund captive in a tower because it was prophesied that the son would rise up against him. After 22 years in prison, Sigismund is taken to the castle as a test to see how he would do as ruler. This quickly leads to an aggressive act against the father. Back in the tower, what happened at Calderón is suggested to him as a dream. Hofmannsthal takes this as a starting point to ask about the legitimacy of rule and violence based on the experience of the First World War – with the devastating fall of the Habsburg monarchy for him – and to conjure up a great world chaos. For many years he tormented himself with this piece, of which there are several variants: a first, in 1923 and 1925 in the magazine New German posts published version in verse form, a second in book form and a third, intended for the theater in 1927, in prose.

Neither version ends well for Sigismund, this Kaspar Hauser character

Hofmannsthal brings two opposing forces into play that harness the naively innocent Sigismund, this Kaspar Hauser character, for their political purposes. On the one hand, there is Julian, the governor of the tower, who kept the king’s son captive like an animal, but also taught him Latin and how to read. He wants his “creature” Sigismund to overthrow his father Basilius at the head of a rebellion that has broken out in the meantime. The other is the soldier Olivier, a brutal butcher, protagonist of the uprising from below. In none of the versions does it end well for Sigismund. Mortally attacked, in the utopian first version he hands over the reins to a pacifist “child king” on his deathbed, whose army of ten thousand children melts swords into ploughshares. In the resigned stage version from 1927, on the other hand, the cold-blooded rebel Olivier, who insidiously has Sigismund shot, is victorious.

Nora Schlocker went back to the last version for her production at the Residenztheater and lets it, severely shortened and cleaned of a lot of personnel, flare up in cold, surreal images in less than two hours. That could have been an exciting rediscovery of a forgotten drama about fundamental questions of autocracy, violence and the succession to power, especially in the present time. But even turning a blind eye to the fact that this plot-tangled, perhaps rightly forgotten piece is already quite a challenge and the season is still young, one cannot help but describe the venture as a failure, as an assiduous, increasingly stale artistic effort.

Irina Schicketanz has narrowed the large Resi stage and built in a high, semi-circular shaft with a concrete base: the tower dungeon in which Sigismund (Lisa Stiegler) vegetates on a chair halfway up the gray dungeon wall. You don’t even realize that the creature up there is a human being. Alienated by video projections, this shivering, belted, bestially screaming creature looks like an alien. In general, the atmosphere of a horror thriller is attempted in this uniform stage dungeon. Close-ups of spiders and wide open, twitching eyes flicker across the concrete wall, the cones of light are cold and piercing, there is a threatening crackling, sizzling and gurgling, a flickering and tones. Cheap horror design from the high-tech theater box.

“Where – so much violence?” is the basic philosophical question of the play

It is an unintelligible, hollow-sounding evening. The actors themselves sometimes don’t seem to fully understand what they (should) play, sometimes in multiple roles. Not only does it have to get through Hofmannsthal’s arrogant language, they also have to cover up Bettina Werner’s unhelpful costumes, which exaggerate every character in a prototypically eccentric manner. Be it tights, doublets and baroque wigs, as in the case of Johannes Nussbaum as the guard Anton and Katja Jung (as Julian), who is tempted here to engage in clumsy recital theatre. Or a soldier monster get-up like that of the ultimately victorious Olivier, whom Valentino Dalle Mura portrays as a monotonous one-armed man with a blank stare and a bloody ax in his remaining hand. Rarely did the Residenztheater look like a provincial theatre.

Michael Goldberg, who looks like a fowl as King Basil in a ruffled white taffeta and tulle dress, holds his own best rich chick with lard and pearl necklace weighing heavily on the neck as an insignia of power. The vain fop turns his refusal to step down in front of the Revolutionary Court into a funny act. Lisa Stiegler also does well in her golem costume, which makes her look like a naked, misshapen giant baby. This Sigismund must also confront his father in this creatureliness. “Where – so much violence?” is the first thing he asks this one. It is the basic philosophical question of the piece.

What happens after the escalation between father and son, Sigismund’s mock execution and later enthronement, Julian’s attempts to steer things pragmatically, the rebellion of the people, Sigismund’s voluntary return to his tower, Schlocker stages all these chaotic events in briefly flashing nightmare images Blackouts and booms in between. Without getting a lot of content. Been to the State Theater. had none of it.