2024-04-27 10:41:43
Images of millennia-old cultural buildings flicker on a huge, curved screen, a face generated with artificial intelligence appears on a high, narrow screen and speaks the first words, the last people climb out from behind a black lava rock. They are survivors of the catastrophe, dressed in fire brigade uniforms or torn life jackets like those seen on airplanes. The actors speak Jelinek’s monologue in the tried and tested manner with assigned roles: “What number of worlds do we assume? How many of them have I used up alone?” they ask themselves, only to then defiantly state: “However, I believe that the world has used me up rather than the other way around.”
So far, so Jelinek. But this new text, which subsequently deals with the plastic pollution of the oceans, the increasingly hotter soil and the air that is no longer breathable, has a second level. In recurring miniatures, the author deals with her very personal apocalypse – the death of her husband in 2022. “I have a glowing knife in my chest, no one will pull it out because otherwise there would be a hole in this place to look through.” , says Ulrike Willenbacher, who as the author’s alter ego always walks on stage with long, white hair, in a touching moment in which she crouches in a transport box while Caspar David Friedrich’s painting “The Wanderer Above” that was previously brought there Sea of Fog” sits enthroned on the lava rock. “My dear darling, we will no longer have any ground under our feet, we will be ground ourselves, isn’t that nice!”
Falk Richter, who had great success with Jelinek’s “Am Königsweg” at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in 2017 and staged Thomas Bernhard’s “Heldenplatz” with a current interlude in Munich in 2021 in the middle of the corona pandemic, relies on haunting images. So he places Bernardo Arias Porras, Katharina Bach and Svetlana Belesova in swimsuits on a beach, where he has them spread a lot of plastic from their cool boxes across the landscape, which he then uses in the next scene from the same people – this time in white research coats fishing in the sea while photos of polluted coral reefs are blended together on the screen. God is also repeatedly invoked, who finally – following questioning Plato – causes the earth to tumble onto the stage in the form of a bright green cube. After all, the earth is “a cube, it has the shape of a cube that this god has always liked to throw around,” it says.
From the destroyed world outside, it always goes back to the destroyed world inside, which Richter also stages in a hospital, in which the players vegetate in desperation in their beds and the nurse decides: “You won’t be able to take care of yourself anymore Take over life, stop being arrogant.” The loss of control spills over into the private sphere. “Nobody looks back at me anymore,” says one of the passages that analyze individual fragility as we age. “I am not the whole world to anyone, not even in the size of a small wallet. From now on others have to break down the world, I’m already too weak for that.”
In both large and small ways, Elfriede Jelinek has swapped her alert cynicism for unvarnished resignation in “Asche”. Falk Richter and the versatile ensemble of the Kammerspiele manage the balancing act of combining huge scenes of the end of the world and fragile moments of very personal despair into an evening that makes it more than clear: it is too late to put “everything back at the beginning”. Long-lasting applause for an evening in which nothing seems to be going well.
(By Sonja Harter/APA)
(SERVICE – “Asche” by Elfriede Jelinek, premiere at the Münchner Kammerspiele. Director: Falk Richter, stage: Katrin Hoffmann, costumes: Andy Visit, music and sound design: Matthias Grübel, video: Lion Bischof, lighting: Charlotte Marr with William Grüger . With Bernardo Arias Porras, Katharina Bach, Svetlana Belesova, Johanna Kappauf, Thomas Schmauser and Ulrike Willenbacher. Other dates: April 30th, May 6th, 8th and 21st and June 2nd).
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