Animals and magnetism – Newspaper Kommersant No. 147 (7348) of 08/15/2022

The drama program of the Salzburg Festival in its first full year after the covid restrictions is extremely rich. Among its premieres is the play “Consolation Madness” by Thorsten Lenzing, a popular director in Germany, which unites people, animals and a large trumpet on the stage. Tells Alexey Mokrousov.

A huge pipe covers the horizon of the stage. In front of her are two adults on the beach acting out scenes from the lives of children. Charlotte (played by Ursina Lardi) and Felix (David Shtrisov) are not just having fun – they remember their parents, deal with their complexes and chance meetings. The scuba diver comes out of the water – literally falls off the pipe, he is barely breathing and, it seems, will now give up. He manages to be saved, and at the same time to play with his flippers. But the conversation that begins can lead to far-reaching consequences if it were not for the ability of the metaphorical theater to play with the circumstances of time and place. The apotheosis of a series of episodes from the life of children and animals is the dialogue of an octopus suffering from loneliness (Ursine Lardi) and a similarly lonely diver subconsciously seeking his own death; the final takes you to the future, to a nursing home. There, 88-year-old Charlotte is cared for by a robotic nurse who can read the patient’s desires from her eyes.

The drama program of the Salzburg Festival, as usual, combines classical dramaturgy and modern texts. This year, one of the main venues, the city drama theater, was closed for repairs, but this did not affect performance in any way. There are five performances on the playbill: firstly, the immortal “Imyarek” by Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, with whom the festival begins every year. “Iphigenia” refers to the texts of Euripides, Racine and Goethe; “Round Dance” by Arthur Schnitzler was rewritten by modern playwrights, including Mikhail Durnenkov. Torsten Lenzing is responsible for modernity with his Consolation Madness, the social-radical is represented by Ingolstadt staged by Ivo van Hove – the most accurate hit, together with Iphigenia, in the leitmotif of this year’s festival, expressed by the word “Inferno”. Dante’s “Hell” was also played live, as part of a marathon, until one in the morning, of the collective reading of the “Divine Comedy” with the participation of such celebrities of the German-speaking theater as Kathleen Morgeneyer.

In part, all this is co-production: the largest drama theaters in Europe work with the festival. For example, Ingolstadt, based on the plays of Marie-Louise Fleisser, who is close to Bertolt Brecht (Fassbinder also filmed one of her plays), was made together with the Vienna Burgtheater. And Lenzing works with eight theaters in France, Germany, Switzerland and Luxembourg at once. But, since the project was initiated by the Austrians, the world premiere took place in Salzburg.

“Consolation Madness” is an unusual performance in many respects. The rehearsals lasted two years – we are talking about rehearsals, and not just thinking about the concept and scenery. For a repertory theater, the timing is unacceptable, and even more so for a festival. But if you want to work with Lenzing, there is nowhere to go: an independent director usually produces projects himself and determines for himself how many months, or even years, to prepare them. They willingly help him: the performances are bright, the critics are delighted, many offer Lenzing the position of director of the theater, but to no avail – this is how the anarchist Kropotkin was called in 1917 to lead the Provisional Government. The last production, Infinite Pleasure based on the novel by David Foster Wallace, was invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen festival – there is almost no higher award in the German-speaking theater: Lenzing stood on a par with Christoph Marthaler, Frank Castorf and Michael Thalheimer, albeit not ahead of them.

The same team of first-class actors has been working with the director for 20 years now. The same Ursina Lardi, an actress of the Berlin Schaubühne Theater, starred in The White Ribbon by Michael Haneke. David Striesow was Jürgen Gosch’s favorite actor in Düsseldorf and starred in the 2006 Oscar-winning film The Counterfeiters, Sebastian Blomberg worked with Castorff’s Volksbühne and the Vienna Burgtheater, and Andre Jung with directors Herbert Wernicke, Jossi Wieler and Johan Simons. Three of them were now participating in the reading of the Divine Comedy.

Expectations were also fueled by Lenzing’s debut as a playwright. Previously, he staged plays or prose, ranging from The Cherry Orchard to The Brothers Karamazov. This time he wrote the text himself, it turned out to be amusing, although the etude is still felt in some mise-en-scenes. On the other hand, when Jung portrays a phlegmatic and thoughtful orangutan, and Blomberg slowly crawls across the stage like a real turtle, reluctantly falling into the hall, there is so much charm in their reincarnation that any seeming length turns into a feeling of a special, theatrical time. And Lardy plays the octopus, as if he has been doing just that all his life, although whether the octopus experiences the fear of death mentioned in the play, which gives rise to fear of life, is more likely to be asked by a diver who is afraid of everything himself. The spectators of the first rows of the stalls also get afraid: that same huge pipe, which at first is a wave, and by the end is the result of a biography (artists Gordian Blumenthal and Ramun Kapaul), is ready, rolling out to the fore, it seems to crush everyone indiscriminately.

The interview in the booklet accompanying the premiere also speaks of Lenzing’s predilection for the world of animals: in animals, they say, he discovers the best interlocutors, silent and understanding. In a situation where lonely old age is brightened up by robot nurses, these confessions look like a hidden utopia, archaic poetry, because of which, in fact, bipedal animals still go to the theater.