Of course there was also a couple who left the hall of the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus prematurely. It might have become too much at the premiere on Saturday night, too many swear words and insults on stage, too much drinking and sex, too much screaming and screaming. Werner Schwab’s plays are not easy fare. Most of the Ottobrunners, however, seemed enthusiastic about Bernd Seidel’s production of the Schwab drama “People’s destruction or my liver is pointless” and the performance of the actors. The applause was long. And it was deserved.
Director Seidel, who has been associated with the Wolf-Ferrari-Haus for a long time, had obviously made the right choice when he decided on the radical comedy by Schwab, born in Graz in 1958; an artist, as Seidel explained to the audience at the beginning, who had died with an alcohol content of 4.5 per mille in his blood. At 35 years of age. So one shouldn’t be surprised if alcohol also plays a role on stage. That’s what liqueur and beer did in the drama about a house community in a bourgeois middle-class apartment house where the Wurms live, the Kovacic family and the owner Mrs. Grollfeuer. But as is so often the case, alcohol is only a symptom here. A means of eliminating feelings of deficit. In a sense, it is the thread from which Schwab wove this great stage material 30 years ago, a fabric within which the actors can play out the repressed and disappointed longings of their characters in a clearly contoured manner. In the role of the crippled painter Hermann Wurm, credibly played by Patrick Gabriel in his naive neediness, Schwab is said to have worked through the difficult relationship with his strictly Catholic mother don’t have to stay in hell! “shouts the mother (Caroline Betz) towards her son in the first scene. The look into the human abyss – it is painful.
Messed up parent-child relationships, abuse, greed, alcohol addiction, repressed feelings, and a father’s fingers wandering to places where they have no business. No, it wasn’t feel-good theater, rather a concentrated declaration of war on the shallow, pleasant, just-entertaining. First performed in 1991 at the Münchner Kammerspiele, “Volksvernichtung or my liver is pointless” established Schwab’s breakthrough. As an author, he polarized and stimulated with sentences that seemed to run nowhere – and precisely because of that aroused. His language, which has gone down in literary history as “Swabian”, piqued and drilled particularly impressively in these Corona years, and this abstruse mélange of crooked images, grammatical blunders and beautiful poetic formulations is allowed to unfold its relentless social criticism in Seidel, too. Dressed in black and white costumes that were a bit reminiscent of skeletons, people in Ottobrunn screamed, screeched, whispered and groaned, while Frau Grollfeuer’s birthday cake looked like hungry vultures in a grotesque exaggeration of the low in people . Speaking of Ms. Grollfeuer: Like none of the characters, this bitter diva, who ruled over her “subjects”, revealed the brutal certainty towards the end of the piece that she had forfeited her life in middle class smugness and alcohol, and that she had accepted lack of love and passion for a little respect and money.
With an accurate page head and pointed fingernails (fabulously played by Marc-Andree Bartelt), she is enthroned at the birthday table above the rest of the household and in a distinguished manner whispers the sentence that gave it the title that “her liver is pointless”. The fact that one did not hide under the covers immediately after the premiere was due to the beautiful, harmonious moments on stage. The gentle warmth of the saxophone (Laetitia Schwende), to whose melodies the actors floated across the stage between the scenes, kept at a distance by rolling metal grids. The laughs that rose again and again – cheerful proof that the production had left enough space for the humorous elements of the drama, the weird gags. A radical staging. But also comedic.