News at the Zurich Schauspielhaus – About trolls and people who explore boundaries
Of trolls and people who push boundaries
A forest has grown in the shipbuilding hall and the premiere of «Border», directed by Christopher Rüping. What a campfire.
The dark floorboards reach down to the feet of the spectators in the first row, director Christopher Rüping has ostentatiously rejected the concept with the ramp and the fourth wall. We are all in the same room – in the shipbuilding hall; or at the end of the world, i.e. on the outskirts of Witikon, where there is a last, lonely little house at the edge of the forest?
The border, which isn’t one and at which everyone bangs their heads for the entire 100 minutes of Metatheater, is the main character of «Border»: That’s the name of the play, which the Schauspielhaus Zürich is based loosely on Ali Abbasis’ Swedish film «Gräns» ( border) developed and has now premiered. And Maja Beckmann jumps from one side of the barrier to the other in her turquoise Adidas trousers and sneakers right from the start: from reality to fiction and back again.
Her name is Maja Beckmann and she is now giving her farewell performance. “Maybe someone saw me here, for example in ‘Medea*’ or in ‘Ring des Nibelungen’ or most recently in ‘Homo Faber’?” In the first-mentioned productions, the Zurich-based actress, who was named “Actress of the Year” in 2021, actually had memorable performances. But the “Homo Faber” performance is a product of the imagination just like Maja’s pregnancy in 2019, which she tells about. Or?
And is it true that Beckmann, like many migrants, simply doesn’t feel at home in Zurich, or is that just theatrical abuse, appropriate to the basis of a brutal story of exclusion and loneliness? She mainly goes to Hamburg, “because I just never really settled down in Zurich”. Despite the privileges of being a member of the ensemble, you always felt disconnected. Just like her neighbor, who was born in Thuringia and works at Zurich Airport for border protection and hunts smugglers. Tine.
Whoops, we’re right in the middle of Ali Abbasis’ film: protagonist Tina can smell fear and feelings of guilt and discovers drugs, black money, child pornography and hidden people for the customs officers. She also lives in isolation. However, nature planted the border in her face, so to speak, unlike the local Tina, given by Wiebke Mollenhauer: The Oscar jury had worked the make-up artists, the wrinkles, small eyes, a chunky nose and crooked teeth into the face of the Swedish film actress, 2018 makeup award nominee.
The eyebrows of Tina from Zurich were dyed away and she wears a very long unisex mullet cut, which places her somewhere between chav clichés of the 1990s and elf fantasy (costume design: Ulf Brauner). But cinema shudders cannot and do not want theater; and when Tina, small and delicate, sinks into the big armchair in the middle of the empty stage, crawls into her childlike Super Mario T-shirt, you just want to comfort her. Maja Beckmann’s plan to integrate Tina into Zurich society almost came to fruition.
But fanfare, and an enchanting Legolas sings himself into the center of attention, with a waving cloak, the obligatory mullet and elven impudence: Benjamin Lillie’s essence of the other art takes comfort out of our hands and out of our hearts and conjures up magic from the floorboards, with the help of a Hosts of trampling trolls, a forest with a pond (Peter Baur created the magnificent stage design). Avenging nature overgrows the city, the world becomes a forest, and the elf advises Tina to forget the audience; and the chatty friend Maja right away. He tells her: “You’re a troll.”
Tina lived with her parents in the forest as a troll child, he claims. People would have snatched her from her relatives, operated on her troll’s tail, and had her parents interned in a psychiatric ward. Tina’s fate was reminiscent of the forced sexual adjustments made on intersex people, such as the Swiss project “Children of the Landstrasse”, in which the children of travelers were taken away. And many similar attempts around the world to deprive substandard people of their basic rights; literally trimming them for mainstream formats.
A little later, however, it says: “It’s just some story. A fairy tale.” This – not exactly original – game with the power of the theater is carried out humorously at the beginning of the evening, for example when Tina sniffs among the audience for tax evaders; it gets harder over time. Did Tina kidnap Maja’s (fictional) baby, alternatively raise it or murder it, or actually never touch it? Or was it just a doll anyway, a child’s dream?
Director Rüping gave the three actors – the fourth in the group, Thomas Wodianka, field an injury at short notice – the freedom to complete the self-reflective edge walks, sometimes on tiptoe, sometimes brutally. And thanks to the phenomenal presence of the three, you feel perfectly spoken, even if not really touched, while the program booklet prompts you with the ethical announcements.
There is talk of the cross-border “experience of community”, of space for “the fictional, non-conformist”, of time out from the “radically rational here and now”. And last but not least, there is a contrite complaint that “we well-to-do people practice the degree,” even the highly subsidized theater. “We have to stop this!” the program booklet calls out. The staging doesn’t call that out. She teases it somehow, while Adele intones “Someone Like You” and the choice, full of relish and peppered with highlights, diffuses into a camp evening arbitrariness. You can’t see the forest for the trees.
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