2023-11-10 23:57:13
All photos: © Susanne Hassler-Smith
VIENNA / Academy Theater of the Burgtheater:
KASPAR by Peter Handke
Premiere: 10. November 2023
It’s been more than half a century since the “sixty-eights” set out to hack the world of their fathers to pieces (in which they succeeded so emphatically that nothing has worked properly since). Peter Handke was a figurehead of the movement, becoming famous as an “audience abuser”, but also with “Kaspar” as the man who separated “theater” from real action and translated it into language. (Although he was later surpassed as a “language player” by his colleague Jelinek.)
The fact that consciousness and individuality are “made” through language is as true today as it was then, today, when rampant terrorists or riotous anti-Semites only act out what “talkers” once drummed into them. Such “sayers” as Handke gave his main character Kaspar, the man without language and background (named following Kaspar Hauser, but absolutely not a historical piece). This would definitely be a work of the hour if one took it seriously,
The American’s staging Daniel Kramer (who is mainly active in the opera scene) showed a decided lack of trust in the text. He replaced that with the noticeable hecticness of considerations that may have said: What can I keep coming up with that is as original as possible in terms of scenery so that the audience doesn’t get bored, because who wants to hear “text” these days, especially sophisticated ones? That’s why the performance doesn’t make the slightest effort to ensure that you can follow Handke’s ideas using the language as a guideline – because you hardly understand them at all.
Of course, Handke himself once wrote that the “sayers” shouldn’t sound like people, but rather like “technically alienated,” but that doesn’t mean that the text doesn’t have to play along at all. The announcers, wrapped in black plastic sheeting (costumes: Shalva Nikvashvili) speak for a long time through a kind of gas mask, which guarantees that the noise you hear is mostly chatter. However, the actor playing Kaspar is not a particularly clear, precise speaker either, so what is lost is what the piece is all regarding – the indoctrination of the empty human brain until, when the intention is right, a monster emerges… Handke himself decidedly ” The guideline of the piece called “speech torture” is drowned in a lot of pop music.
What was intended as mental acrobatics for the viewer is, in the eyes of the Kusej-Burgtheater, conceivable as a comedy, which can unfold in a hellish and cheerful way between clowning and comics, between puppet theater and pop performance.” Yes, if that’s enough for you…
There is an attempt to send Kaspar, who (as usual) falls from the sky, through a few stages of being human, which is why the stage design (Annette Murschetz) walks regularly and without irritation. Kaspar as a baby, probably at school, experiences with death until he ends up in an unbearably long silent (and invented) scene in an apartment that he apparently shares with his four narrators,
Yes, and here it happens – while the first Academy Theater premieres (“Petra von Kant” and “Phädra”) were lesbian plays, the other half of the empire is now being served: all three gentlemen in the play are allowed to take off their clothes and present themselves in this way, and Since the dramaturgical necessity for this is zero (as is the use of the toilets, but without that it’s no longer possible), the only speculation behind it can be to attract a little more audience that might otherwise not come to the piece…
At the end of this scene, the four announcers apparently kill themselves while Kaspar storms off with a submachine gun, and that might be a good thing. But you still have to stick a brightly colored circus clown scene on it, and in the end Kaspar, naked once more, sits in front of a kind of large capsule, thinking. Does he want to be shot into space?
Either way, you don’t really care what this man does, who doesn’t actually gain any profile. Marcel Heuperman is always used as the Burgtheater’s powerful giant baby, but no matter how much he rages (at the end covered in blood in a woman’s robe, don’t ask why), absolutely no figure comes out of it that it would have been important to shape.
Whoever would have played the four narrators, they are a lost effort for themselves, the piece and the audience, as they usually do not appear as individuals anyway. So you recognize it late, but still Markus Scheumann (a waste), so may Jonas Hackmann The two ladies tried to make it lie around as a corpse for a while Laura Balzer and Stefanie Dvorak fruitless.
This evening, Handke’s text goes nowhere. The tasteful (and sometimes silly) production is even more so. As always at the Burgtheater, there was much applause from the premiere audience.
Renate Wagner
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