Review of the play “In the Name of the Breeze” by Christophe Marthaler in Hamburg

The famous director Christophe Marthaler, the author of large opera and dramatic productions, released a chamber and unusually quiet performance – “In the Name of the Breeze” based on the poems of Emily Dickinson. It was released in the Mahler Hall of the Hamburg Schauschpielhaus and became the second part of an as yet unfinished triptych, the first part of which is dedicated to Friedrich Hölderlin. Watched how poetry turns into music Alla Shenderova.

Before becoming a director, the Swiss Marthaler graduated from the conservatory. Even today, for fun, he can play the flute. His dramatic performances always involve singing and playing music. However, Marthaler had not previously dealt with poetry in its pure form. Or rather, he turned prosaic, sometimes iconic stories into it – like the unification of Germany after the fall of the Wall, which became the theme of his famous musical play “Kill a European…”.

No such grandiose event formed the basis for “In the Name of the Breeze.” It would be inaccurate to say that this hour and a half performance is dedicated to the poetry of Emily Dickinson – he himself is poetry. Its whimsical fabric is playfully woven by six actors, the sounds of a synthesizer, a piano, the sound of a metronome, and various things like station turnstiles, a loudspeaker, and the like.

The Mahler Hall has been converted into a small waiting room. Such halls become the setting for any of Marthaler’s performances, no matter whether he collaborates with his famous collaborator, the artist Anna Fiebrock, or with someone else. However, in this case, what happens is not in a conventional waiting room that replaces purgatory, but in a very specific one. We are talking about the station hall in Amherst, the arrival of the first train on May 3, 1853 was a big event in the life of almost three thousand residents who poured into the street. Everyone was happy, except 23-year-old Emily, the daughter of a lawyer and politician, and later US Congressman Edward Dickinson, who hurried into the forest.

We will never know why Emily began to avoid people, left the seminary, why she chose celibacy, whether she had real novels and exactly how many poems she wrote. Seven of them were published during his lifetime. Emily seems to have bequeathed all the rest to be burned. The only photograph captured her either at 16 or 17 years old – a thin, gloomy girl, calmly but decisively looking into the lens.

As the audience takes their seats, a girl in a flowery suit and hat hits a synthesizer key—infrequently, about once a minute. Then two men in gray uniforms come out of the booths where switchmen or conductors usually sit and run their hands along the turnstile pipes, one of them making a rhythmic creaking noise, while the other remains “voiceless.” A fan under the ceiling turns on – so noisy that one of the conductors blows his whistle, as if calling the equipment to order. Then a man in a cloak and with a stack of notes will appear. All this will happen in a clearly structured rhythm – so that the audience will have no doubts: what we are seeing is not physical actions, not illustrations of poems, but the poems themselves.

And when the space rings and pulsates in a single rhythm, the fan, also known as the loudspeaker, turns on – and we hear a hoarse female voice reading Dickinson’s lines. Perhaps she came to us herself. Or maybe not. We also don’t know who the male voice reading poetry in the second part of the play belongs to—a connoisseur of her work, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, with whom Dickinson had a long-term epistolary relationship, or someone else. But that doesn’t matter.

“The Theater is not favorable for the Poet, and the Poet is not favorable for the Theater,” Marina Tsvetaeva loved to quote Heine’s line. So, Marthaler manages to create an environment so favorable for poetry that everything can coexist perfectly in it, like in an outlandish herbarium: Liszt’s music, some modern hit sung by actors a cappella, and much more.

While you are watching this performance, performed in German, with quickly flashing English subtitles, you often remember Russian poets. The same Tsvetaeva with her “Life is a train station, I’ll soon be leaving, I won’t tell you where,” and even more often “For this hell, for this nonsense, / Send me a garden for my old age.” And even “I will grow grass to you…” by Gennady Shpalikov

The fact is that the reclusive Dickinson cultivated her garden in Amherst all her life. Literally and figuratively. She adored plants and collected herbariums. And, being a rebel, she even came up with her own trinity: “In the name of the bee” – instead of “In the name of the Father”; “In the name of the breeze” – instead of the Holy Spirit and “In the name of the butterfly” – instead of “In the name of the Son” (according to Dickinson, the butterfly emerges from its chrysalis, just as the resurrected Jesus emerges from its shroud).

In the end, this little performance rises to the point of generalization. And it’s not that he imposes his understanding of Dickinson’s poems and fate on the viewer, but immerses him in that state in which everyone derives the formula of the poet and poetry himself.