Wonderfully changeable: portrait of the actress Barbara Nüsse – Kultur

There are not many actresses in the world who play a nine-year-old explosive brat one day and a barbiturate-dependent pensioner with a walker, vodka bottle and nasty mind the next. Even rarer are the quick-change artists who can transform all supporting roles into small main roles in one piece and switch between the sexes without any credibility problem. Barbara Nüsse can do that. And she does. Currently she is doing gymnastics and dancing as Pippi Longstocking on the stage of the Hamburg Thalia Theater, does headstand and flexible movements that would make some nine-year-olds out of breath. And in “Eurotrash”, the second stage adaptation of Christian Kracht’s successful novel after the world premiere at the Berlin Schaubühne, she shows with the greatest power of conviction the aged fragility of Kracht’s mother figure, which she completely misses.

Barbara Nüsse is 78 years old, but this number has at most an actuarial significance. As a natural shapeshifter who does not need huge effects departments for her transitions between age, character and appearance like in Hollywood, Barbara Nüsse plays nine different pieces in the current program of the Thalia Theater. And not a second of it is an effect. Whether as Queen Elisabeth she plays the key scene from Schiller’s “Maria Stuart” with Karin Neuhäuser as a comedic duel of insults, as Hamlet’s mother embodies severe concern in a red lacquer gala or the single parent of a good-for-nothing in Hanoch Levin’s play “Krum” disappointed with the pain Family dreams come true, Barbara Nüsse is always on point, and not just reliably, but immediately.

She is always the right line-up, even for Oskar Matzerath in the “Tin Drum”

There is no period of weakness in their diversity. Not a moment of perceived presumption where a doubt could creep in as to whether Nuts is the right person. She is always the right person, even for Oskar Matzerath, the eternal child from Günter Grass’ “Tin Drum”, which represents the opposite of an actor with sixty years of professional experience in terms of both sex and age. Immediately after graduating from high school, the engineering daughter from Sprockhövel in the Ruhr area, the cradle of German mining, applied for the audition role “Phädra” at the Otto Falckenberg School in Munich and was accepted. And since then, like Oskar Matzerath, Barbara Nüsse does not really age, only gains wisdom in living in an elastic body that she keeps fit with a few daily stretching exercises, gardening and walks with her dogs.

However, the miracle of their physical and mental agility can be traced back to training performance. She was active in the gymnastics club from the age of six until graduation, later practicing ballet and dancing so much (“and well,” as she says) that she almost ended up at Pina Bausch’s dance theater in Sprockhövel’s neighboring town of Wuppertal. She had just had enough of “all the Peymanns”, the directors’ group of the sixties and seventies, for whom she worked as a young actress, at the Munich Residenztheater with Helmut Henrichs, in Cologne with Hansgünther Heyme, and in Stuttgart with Claus Peymann, up to to his expulsion by the “right asshole Filbinger”, as Nüsse says about the former prime minister and, before that, the Nazi naval judge.

“I didn’t do it after all, because I love to deal with words,” Nüsse explains her rejection to Pina Bausch. But the dancing energy, which in “Pippi Longstocking” does not show any difference in agility to her half-age colleagues like Ole Lagerpusch or Maja Schöne, remained with her. Dance is her constant background tension. When she speaks of her inspirations and role models, her eyes don’t shine with the great divas of the post-war period, but when she speaks of her fascination for the tempo and crash soloist of the Canadian extreme dance company La La La Human Steps speaks, Louise Lecavalier, “a magical creature” as Nuts calls it.

At the Thalia Theater, Nüsse has long been a magical creature herself. Since 2010, with her third permanent position in Hamburg (in 1980 she came to the Deutsche Schauspielhaus with Niels-Peter Rudolph and from 1993 she was also engaged by Frank Baumbauer), she became a woman for everyone Cases. Luk Perceval, with whom she had worked most intensively at the beginning of her Thalia time, paved the way for her to “plutimize” – as Pippi would say – of characters. He often cast her as a man, had her play the tin drum, and gave her almost all supporting roles, regardless of gender and age, in his staging of Borchert’s “Outside Front Door”. As a spiteful neighbor, a cynical colonel, a cowardly cabaret boss and, finally, as God, she tormented Beckmann, who was returning from the war, as a chameleon-like one-woman ensemble. Divine.

“You can only be intelligent if you also have empathy”

The question of how did you do it, Ms. Nüsse, is answered by a didactic comparison of vanity and empathy as a professional approach. There are “personality actors” who primarily “present their personality on stage, albeit sometimes in a great way”. That is not her way. “With this type of actor, vanity prevents what a character could offer from being exploited to the full.” Nüsse, on the other hand, believes in empathy: “You can only be intelligent if you are also empathetic.” Authentic play therefore has “a lot to do with imagination”. And how does it maintain credibility in the constant transformation? “I mistrust everything that is wrong. Apparently I have a pretty good sense for that.” Fake feelings? “I always felt sick.”

Barbara Nut’s advantage – and the basis of her kaleidoscopic game – seems to be that she is not vain, in the sense of being in love with herself and addicted to recognition. That’s why she dares something. For example, going to the school of post-dramatic theater at the end of sixties. When Nicolas Stemann’s “Faust I and II” production was open to format in 2011, she initially thought, “I can’t do that, I don’t even know what he wants from me.” But she got involved, found Stemann’s concept more and more plausible and in the end “almost ingenious”.

Open detailed view

Now Christian Kracht’s family story “Eurotrash” – the author’s trip to Switzerland with his anesthetized mother, lurching between vanity and snobbery, self-denial and affection. Stefan Pucher, who has become known as a pop director, staged the novel with Nüsse and Jirka Zett as Kracht’s alter ego at Thalia in Gaußstrasse. Here, Pucher is surprisingly true to the original, cleverly shortened to include Kracht’s endless bragging of wealth attributes, world trips and prominent acquaintances among the top staff of the old Federal Republic. Zett und Nüsse celebrate this fair rendition with touches of “Harold and Maude” eroticism in an almost cinematic relationship realism. Everyone who has seen Nuts as an anarchist redhead in Jette Steckel’s Pippi-Revue can hardly believe that this wide awake wreck in a Chanel costume is the same actress.

As a woman who is so alien to showing off that she actually doesn’t want to read any portraits about herself, and who rejects every compliment by saying that it was a particularly good staging, she also says little about private matters. That she was once with Gerhard Richter, who painted a portrait of her sleeping; that in the 1960s she hung out with some of the great upcoming artists in Munich and Cologne who – such as the light artist Dan Flavin – dedicated works to her; that she fled from his vernissages with Blinky Palermo and actually witnessed the whole wild time at the end of the sixties, when art was much more exciting for her than theater – all of that would probably be worth a nice little book. That Barbara Nüsse doesn’t want to write because she has too much respect for the literary word.

And because, after all, she was always only loyal to the theater. Even when she appears in a hit series like “Dark” on Netflix (where, despite her aging skills, she is only allowed to embody the third generation “Eva”), her true magic realm is the stage, the place where the audience immediately expresses their unobtrusive empathy experience and admire. And quietly ask yourself: Is there anything that Barbara Nüsse cannot play?