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Oberammergau (dpa) - The plague raged in the country when the Oberammergauers made their vows: every ten years they wanted to perform the Passion when nobody dies anymore.
Almost 400 years later, the performance failed due to the corona pandemic: shortly before the premiere in May of last year, the cancellation came.
Game director Christian Stückl postponed the amateur play by two years as a precaution, to 2022. Now the preparations are slowly rolling again.
Advance ticket sales have been running since October.
Half of the ticket holders had rebooked from 2020 to 2022, and around 60 percent of the tickets are already gone.
From May 14th to October 2nd, 2022, the famous amateur play about the life, death and resurrection of Jesus is to come on stage.
450,000 guests from all over the world are expected to attend around 100 performances.
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Stückl, who is staging the Passion for the fourth time, will not start from scratch.
«Anyone who wants to keep their role.
I estimate that 95 percent of the people also take on the role, ”he says shortly after the cancellation in March 2020.
The next milestone for the restart: the hair and beard waiver on Ash Wednesday.
Then, following tradition, the players are no longer allowed to have their hair and beard cut.
A year ago, thick beards and flowing manes could be seen on the streets of the town.
But after the Passion was canceled, most of them had used razors and scissors.
Some people still don't start with a very short one - instead, given the lockdown, they already have a "corona hairstyle".
Almost 2,500 people from Oberammergau - around half of all residents - want to take part.
Everyone who was born and raised in Oberammergau or has lived there for 20 years has the right to play.
The game master has to see how he accommodates everyone.
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Hundreds of residents, sometimes as the people of Israel in Old Testament scenes, sometimes as residents of Jerusalem, form a powerful figure on the 40-meter-wide stage.
Hardly conceivable at the moment: “You can't imagine a crowd scene with almost 1000 participants on stage today, but maybe the world will look different again in twelve months”, says Frederik Mayet, who will give Jesus for the second time and also Spokesman for the Passion Play amateur plays.
Nevertheless: "I am very optimistic that we will be back to a largely normalcy in 2022."
The time-out brought some distance.
"At the moment I don't think much about the Passion, only when my 81-year-old mother puts in the Passion music again and sings along enthusiastically," says Andrea Hecht, who will be giving Maria next year.
The game has been postponed several times in its almost 400-year history, just a hundred years ago, and then by two years: Due to the consequences of the First World War, it was not played until 1922 instead of 1920.
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«After two years you have to start all over again to rehearse.
We have to start up the whole machinery again in October 2021, ”says director Stückl.
Then the work in the workshops and the choir rehearsals should start again.
From January 2022, Stückl wants to bring the actors to rehearsals on the Passion Stage.
They will then have to work hard.
“I think I don't have 90 percent of the texts I've already learned at hand,” Mayet says.
"In terms of rehearsals, we will not start where we left off, but start all over again," says the second Jesus Rochus Rückel;
each role is filled twice.
"Two more years do something to you, you change over time."
This means that the Passion in 2022 will be different in many ways, says Rückel.
He looks "full of confidence and anticipation" to 2022.
"The motivation to finally complete what has been started and bring it to the stage is - I believe - huge in everyone," says the second Maria, Eva-Maria Reiser.
"The postponement of the Passion Play and Corona completely mixed up all of my professional and private plans."
Months of preparation, rehearsals - and then at least five hours on stage with 50 performances, because that's how long a performance takes: That demands a lot from the players.
How and whether the corona crisis is reflected in the text?
"It's a very strange situation, and where it leads is open," says Stückl, who always works on the text alone, accompanied by a church advisor.
Work always ends shortly before the premiere, he says.
"The text is not a fixed structure."
Stückl has changed a lot in three decades as a game master.
Married women are also allowed to play Maria today, a taboo until 1990.
In Stückl's first Passion, a Protestant was given a leading role, and in the end he also set an example with his choice of players: for the first time, two Oberammergau Muslims have leading roles.
The cancellation in March was obviously difficult for Stückl.
Nevertheless, he has emphasized several times: This is not the big drama.
The real dramas took place in refugee camps, for example, to which hardly any attention was paid during the Corona crisis.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210106-99-912549 / 3
Passion Play Oberammergau 2022