The only living being that Inge Lohmark will touch that evening is dead and armored.
And so she is aptly staged, this lonely protagonist from Judith Schalansky's much-praised novel.
Inge Lohmark is a biology and sport teacher at a grammar school in Western Pomerania.
The region, the school and the teacher have supposedly had their prime: the region is falling into disrepair, the school is to be closed and Lohmark's philosophy of life begins to become fragile in the face of her sudden affection for a student.
So far she has gone through life with a vulgar Darwinian worldview of competition and assertiveness.
Weakness is not allowed, neither for others nor for oneself. Life sees it as a struggle and school as a combat zone.
She considers love and closeness to be biochemical illusions - a belief with which she tries to justify her marriage, which has degenerated into a community of convenience, and the lost contact with her daughter.
Fanatic expressions of conviction
At the premiere of the Magdeburg adaptation of the novel, we watch this lonely woman take stock of her life. It is a tough, gnawing struggle between the demonstrative serenity of their worldview and an unacknowledged despair that actually knows better. The actress Susi Wirth plays this virtuoso: sometimes with a fanatical grimace of conviction and a cold smile that tries above all to convince herself. Sometimes with fearful disorientation and a face that seems more and more exhausted from the permanent self-indefeasibility. What do you do with a failed philosophy of life when you are actually too old to look for a new one and too young to be indifferent to anything? Wirth shows inside views of a person lost in his world of thought.
Thilo Voggenreiter directs Judith Schalansky's 2011 novel as a monologue. This is consistent, because all the other characters in the book are only perceived from Lohmark's perspective. The staging shows a sensitive understanding of the original and a skilful adaptation with the means of the stage. For example, the scientific drawings from the novel (Judith Schalansky is known as a studied typography, especially through her book design work) are taken up on the stage in biology lessons. And while the claustrophobic nature of Lohmark's inner world is illustrated by repetitions and variations in the novel, this is expressed here in the fact that the protagonist, in almost every attempt at movement on sports equipment,comes across stuffed birds or other school supplies. . In this way the stage becomes a topography of loneliness, full of the relics of a messed up life, to which principles were always more important than feelings.
“What just ruined you?” One would like to shout out to the Lohmark and the stage version puts more weight on this existential question than the novel itself. Overall, the text has been greatly shortened and the decisive moments come to the fore. In the interplay of drama and stage design, this works well for a long time, even if the staging sometimes seems a little rushed due to the compressed form. On the other hand, this adaptation of the novel succeeds all the more in making the trembling discomfort between the sentences palpable. In the mute intermediate scenes, accompanied by haunting piano music, Inge Lohmark carefully gropes through the set or brushes against bars and gymnastics rings. Everything that was resolved like a mask finally disappeared from her facial expression.Instead, we see a vulnerability that leaves open what will become of it: one that is forever depressed or perhaps one that starts all over again.