What an evening at the theater! You go out feeling full, as if you’ve been served too much, too many calories, too many fats, too much of a good thing. Also with a feeling of excess length, three hours have passed faster, there was even a pause that came when you could have thought, the piece might now be over, as it would have to be in two other places afterwards May be over, but not over yet. “What are you producing here over-length?” Asks the author himself once in his text. Actually it could actually have gone on and on, endlessly, because the piece is ultimately about “that we learn nothing from history, that it never ends”, that we “always produce the same images”.
And when it comes to an end and sags and digests and a lot opens up again, then you would like to see this piece again at the Münchner Kammerspiele, hear it again, if only because of the music (Anton Berman), which really is is fantastic, and because of the dolls with their own magic, and because of the six great actors or better: actors who you like to watch in confused and excess situations and who you just like to look at. And, yes, also because of the language.
There are liturgical elements and Latin sentences as well as youth language Anglicisms, “oh whatever”
The author Thomas Köck really has a strong, poetic, charming, highly musically composed language. “Your palaces are empty (all we ever wanted)” is written like a long poem without periods and commas, everything in a raging flow, without role ascriptions, without scene instructions, the change of location and scene is only marked by two slashes (//) . The Austrian language artist calls his piece a “Missa in cantu”, a mass with singing by the priest. There are liturgical elements and Latin sentences as well as today’s jargon and youth language Anglicisms, “you assholes”, “oh whatever”.
It is a journey down the language stream into the heart of the darkness of European colonialism as the origin of global capitalism, based on Dante’s “Divine Comedy”, divided into the three stations “Inferno”, “Purgatorio” and “Paradiso”. Whereby paradise promises no redemption, neither from the repetitive loops and apory loops of human history nor from those of the play and the staging, which is exuberant in every respect.
It comes from Jan-Christoph Gockel and is, on the one hand, from an ingenuity that is compulsive to visualize, which also has its pitfalls, because in this jungle of associations you can sometimes no longer see the forest for the trees – and you can no longer recognize the dramaturgy (Gockel rearranges the text, like it he likes). On the other hand, it is in parts pure radio play. The balance between the two is not quite right. Nevertheless, this premiere is a fascination. She has something very special, artistically special. In the best scenes she tells of a great emptiness and forlornness, of a deep existential pain. And then suddenly she embraces you.
Derelict palace: The stage looks exactly like the auditorium of the Münchner Kammerspiele with its beautiful Art Nouveau tier – only that it is already crumbling away here.
(Photo: Armin Smailovic / Agentur Focus)
When it starts, we viewers see ourselves mirrored: The actors are sitting on a beautifully curved Art Nouveau theater balcony and look down at us from above, full of expectation, boredom, increasingly indignant. Julia Kurzweg grandiose cites the auditorium of the Kammerspiele in her set design, at least the tier and two boxes, which has a great effect, especially since the architecture here is only a ruin – half decayed like the palace that Thomas Köck had a narrator’s voice in lyrical singsong wandered through.
With that the piece starts. From here, the abandoned rooms of a destroyed culture, it starts and looks back at the origins and excesses of global capitalism with its complete exploitation of the planet. In the narrative self, the blind seer Teiresias appears, this mythological figure who, after being bitten by a snake, was a woman for a while and was then transformed back into a man, a prophetic figure who knows the course of things and yet never as a doer intervenes – the analogies to us today, to those who are well informed about the climate crisis and other facts, are obvious.
Most beautiful chaos, worst violence
Teiresias’ package tour to the inner circle of hell goes back to the time around 1550, when the sailors of the Spanish crown in today’s Brazil brutally subjugated the Amazon in search of the legendary gold country Eldorado. This is where the fabulous characters of the puppet maker and actor Michael Pietsch come into play, who forms a solid team with the director Gockel. Greed was carved into the face of the nasty Don Gairre, who not by chance reminds of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog’s film “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”. And that mangy doll, which represents the Christian missionary torturer Don Stepano, looks like a drunk Franz Josef Strauss (whose former Africa shops Gockel / Pietsch dedicated their own very brilliant production at the Kammerspiele: “We blacks have to stick together”). Plus a whole auxiliary army of little conquistators who hang like (and as) soldier puppets on a pole. The fact that and how the black actress Nancy Mensah-Offei gives them her voice is something that moves you.
The use of puppets (adopted by the actors in terms of language and play) creates a lot of bitter comedy. Just wonderful how their armor and breastplates rattle when they are crossed. Instead of a ship, the Spaniards invade Brazil with allusions in an old VW Golf. Live cameras are used to impressively film from inside the car, where dolls and people crowd and are violently pugned and squeaked. The Castorf style has not only passed school, but has also long since graduated from high school. Most beautiful chaos. The worst violence.
Another narrative thread – this is the weaker part – is about the current opiate epidemic in the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Americans depend on opioid pain relievers, which makes pharmaceutical companies billions in profits. This is also a form of greed for profit. And an attempt to escape the emptiness described by Köck, the great lovelessness of our time. Many die from the stuff. Like the parents of that mute puppet boy that the director Gockel built into the play, a sad, poetic figure with large, human-looking eyes who looks blankly at what man has done and left him as an inheritance.
The opiate affair also leads to an addicted celebrity (Bernardo Arias Porras) whose home is besieged by a television crew. And to a slaughterhouse, where overworked, poorly paid, drugged people die from exhaustion. Gockel stages this as a garish fast-food farce and skater ballet in front of the McDonald’s logo: an oversized, shining yellow M as the golden calf of our days. Sometimes the actors curve in latex costumes on roller skates, sometimes they simulate a kind of “philosophical sextet” on smokers’ television in the seventies, and sometimes everyone is Teiresias with a bloody blindfold.
It is a great, sad swan song, carried by the voice as well as the live music. Anton Berman on keyboard and Maria Moling on drums play everything from heavy to melodramatic, sometimes supported by Christian Löber on the electric guitar and the brilliant Katharina Bach, who can do pretty much everything, including the trumpet. At the end, the entire scenery is covered with a white sheet. The palace is orphaned. Everything dead. There are only: hollow-eyed ghosts. We created it ourselves.