Review: Dürrenmatt at the Zurich Schauspielhaus - This is how classic theater works

Criticism: Dürrenmatt at the Schauspielhaus - This is how classic theater works

For Dürrenmatt's hundredth, director Nicolas Stemann has "The Visit of the Old Lady" in the peacocks sing and speak. go there!

Ding Dong! And Patrycia Ziolkowska rushes off to receive the next package. Ding dong! Now Sebastian Rudolph is carrying another box onto the Pfauenbühne. Packing paper, boxes and shoes, shoes, shoes fill the stage with garbage. Yellow shoes, some of them golden like our Corona certificate bracelet on our arm. The video projection shows mountains of parcels, overflowing Amazon warehouses in pandemic times.

"Business for a corpse," states the old lady dryly, this Dürrenmatt beast of capitalist consumer frenzy - chorus spoken by Ziolkowska and Rudolph. «If you can't pay, you have to hold out if you want to dance. And you want to dance too!" Who does not want that? The Canadian-Swiss electro performer Camilla Sparksss sings "Givin' it up for this, Yeah": She is the musical, cold, powerfully beating heart of this production of Friedrich Dürrenmatt's "The Visit of the Old Lady".

The trio of two actors and one musician delivers the anniversary production – Dürrenmatt would have turned 100 this year, his showpiece turned 65 – packed in a black box (stage and video: Claudia Lehmann). Ding dong! We accept the package, oh no, we pounce on it, rip it open, reach greedily for these sentences – which, it seems to us, have never been better spoken, never shot more excitingly, never weighed more carefully. Which have never been more adeptly converted into hits in a present that knows other predetermined breaking points than those of 1956.

Projections of filthy seas, burning forests, demonstrating women illustrate the subtext of this production. And the lyrics? What else can, may, should you take away from the stage hit that has been played out x times? Nicolas Stemann, the director and co-director of the Schauspielhaus Zürich, who originally wanted to put the choice on the day of the premiere (Corona sparked between). Stemann realized: pretty much everything. But different.

He cut rather few lines, but many actors. He allowed (himself) blunt socio-critical tips, but also funny punchlines, spitting and puke orgies, playful standards like the castrated false witnesses Koby and Loby, voices from the off, on stage, in the parquet. Audiovisual Kurzweil. Entertainment.

It remains recognizable, the scandalous story of the 62-year-old who returns to the city of Güllen to take bloody revenge for the fact that her lover left her pregnant and penniless 45 years ago; forced into the gutter. The story is even sharpened, cuts into our comforts and lazy everyday excuses, without a director's theater berserker having chopped up the original drama.

The arrival of the multi-billionaire in the run-down provincial town, for example, is played through several times, while the video title announces the first act: After all, we don't do illusion theater here. Sometimes the 42-year-old German actress acts as the well-travelled lady, first in seemingly gentle memory mode, then grotesquely roughened, finally hurt and full of rage. Sometimes Rudolph, who is ten years his senior and already a fixed star in the Zurich theater cosmos in the Marthaler days, takes on the role. Nobody can be as serious as he is!

The two of them stand side by side at first in their wide, dark culottes and white tops: androgynous twins, multifunctional foils for the almost forty rolls. And yet as individual as only actors are who could also manage a "Faust" marathon - and did so ten years ago in Stemann's direction.

Hard happy ending

After almost two and a half hours of "visiting" - in which we actually let ourselves be shocked anew by the familiar, in which we also laughed and only very, very rarely furtively glanced at the clock – rolled the merciless tragic comedy into its harsh happy ending. Alfred Ill, the faithless lover, is dead, murdered by his corruptible fellow citizens, to whom the old lady promised a billion in return. «Zauberhexchen», the old woman patched together out of prostheses, left triumphantly with the coffin, the witch is very much alive! And the big party is going on in Güllen.

Then Ziolkowska and Rudolph stand there again, smiling familiarly at each other; in her tender embrace is, yes, forgiveness? The resigned knowledge of the destructive human weakness? The two disappear. But the guilt remains. "A debt, an open account, a committed injustice," the video titles had shouted in between. «The desire for reparation, justice, emergency brake».

Subtle is different, but there is no need for cryptic stuff in the highly moral drama with the inextricable aporias, in which somehow all the perpetrators and victims are at the same time. Especially in this post-postmodern version of Stemann. In the finale, Sparksss opens his mouth to silently complain - about colonialism and climate sins, patriarchy and #MeToo structures, the injustice of everything. The old ladies are invading our cities, our nemesis is ringing the doorbell: ding dong! And I'm ashamed of the car key that seems to be on fire in my pocket.

Alexandra Kedves works as a culture editor in the life department. She writes mainly about theater as well as social and educational policy issues. Studied German, English and philosophy in Constance, Oxford and Freiburg i Br.

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