Franzobel’s “The Raft of the Medusa” in the Salzburg Theater – Culture –
How do you bring a shipwreck tragedy from 1816 to a theater stage? In Susi Weber’s adaptation at the Salzburg Schauspielhaus, Franzobel’s novel “The Raft of the Medusa” becomes a dry affair. With set designer Isabel Graf, she decided on a museum atmosphere as the setting. The focus is not on Theodore Guéricault’s famous monumental painting from the Louvre, but on a raft placed between red cords that could be an art installation.
Similar installations by Ai Weiwei, for example, open up clear associations to today’s tragedies on the high seas, where refugees drown every day. In 2017, in his almost 600-page “novel based on a true story”, Franzobel did not only describe the story of the frigate “Medusa”, which ran aground on a sandbank off the West African coast. Far too few lifeboats make it necessary to accommodate a good part of the crew on a raft. However, it was not necessary, indeed downright barbaric, to leave this to its own devices without control. Only a tenth of the crew survived a two-week ordeal, using the dead as food. After two weeks, the last 15 survivors were rescued from 147 abandoned.
It was “impossible to present both the reality of the event and Franzobel’s adaptation appropriately one-to-one on one stage,” the director stated in the program of yesterday’s Austrian premiere. At the beginning, the action on stage seems like a mixture of masked ball and vernissage: Between two tables with a buffet set up, in front of a large picture of the sea and a famous drummer (Wolfi Rainer) placed in front of it, who could possibly come into play more, an evening party cavorts bizarre costumes. The ensemble is looking more as storytellers than players. You can only lose when you try to recreate the images on a theater stage, says Susi Weber. Of course, that creates a certain distance. Only a few scenes, such as when the raft crew are thrown from drinking cups by those who escaped in the lifeboat, thus implying a severe thunderstorm, actually get under your skin.
Strange: In the course of her stage journeys, Medusa’s raft became faster and faster. In May 2019, a dramatization of the extensive novel in Münster lasted 2 hours 40 minutes, in December 2021 in Mannheim only 1 hour 50 minutes. In Salzburg you are a quarter of an hour faster. Many developments are greatly shortened as a result. Precisely where the agonizingly slow passage of time would emphasize the hopelessness and the accelerated loss of humanity, short off-screen announcements drive the action on unnecessarily.
What still sticks is the grotesque overconfidence of the inexperienced captain on his first big voyage and his jaded friend (Antony Connor and Marcus Marotte as a duo of pompous clowns), the despair of the career-conscious ship’s officer who came early to the tragedy (Maximilian Thienen), the grotesque ignorance of the governor (Olaf Salzer) or the ship’s doctor (Theo Helm) fighting to preserve human self-respect. “It’s the same in hell,” he states, when, with lots of ketchup, a cruel decision is made between starvation and cannibalism. The evening, which received a lot of applause at yesterday’s premiere, was not a real trip to hell. But the dry run for this also gives an idea of what was once stated from the off: what was seen here is not the exception, but the rule of our coexistence. We tear each other apart. It’s just that it’s hardly noticeable in everyday life.
(SERVICE – “The Raft of Medusa” based on the novel by Franzobel, direction and version: Susi Weber, equipment: Isabel Graf, music: Wolfi Rainer. With Antony Connor, Marcus Marotte, Maximilian Thienen, Olaf Salzer, Susanne Wende, Magdalena Oettl , Theo Helm, Jannik Görger, Jakob Kücher, Wolfgang Kandler and Christiane Warnecke. Austrian premiere at the Schauspielhaus Salzburg, dates until March 6. )