At the beginning of Dörte Lyssewski's Salzburg production of “The New Menoza”, Prince Tandi (Skye Macdonald) is also confronted with the conviction of the supposed cultural superiority of the West, which is particularly pronounced in Saxony. The main character in this play by Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz, which the director presented as part of the feature series “Change of the Schedule” (FAZ September 4, 2019), stops at the Biederling family in Naumburg, where the Bourgeois house blessing is in trouble: The marriage has been brought to shame over the loss of the only son, who was sent to Asia as a young man with the Jesuits - also out of financial difficulties.Outstanding in the overall strong ensemble Tina Eberhardt and Axel Meinhardt with the lacony and despair of partners who are used to mutual wounds.
On site, the “Indian prince” is asked about his opinion about the local situation, as the purpose of his trip from the point of view of the local magisters can only be “to get to know the customs of the most enlightened nations of Europe and to transplant them into your fatherly soil ".
The evil of gelatinized lust
The sober ascetic “Oriental” in a white pleated skirt, however, turns out not to be a naive admirer or a noble savage, but a man with a keen eye on the supposedly enlightened Occident. "Everywhere you smell, nonchalance, lazy, impotent desire, chatter about action," the prince exclaims indignantly at the dubious representatives of this approaching bourgeois society. They have nothing in common with the ideal of a measured and disciplined subject, which is especially true of Count Cameleon.
This rascal, played brilliantly by Marco Dott in his devious smeariness, is not only on the run from justice after a murder, but also tries to first poison his wife Donna Diana (constantly in a state of emergency: Judith Mahler) and then Biederling's daughter Wilhelmine ( a little pale: Patrizia Unger), whereby he - and here the criticism of Goethe's temporary companion Lenz of the emotional cult of his time becomes evident - always tries to hide his instincts behind the vocabulary of the prevailing sensitivity.
But the prince has long since recognized the evil of the "gelatinized lust", beats up the culprit and marries Wilhelmine. The presumably happy ending is only the beginning of a whole series of wild coups. First the news arrives that the prince is the missing Biederling son, but the brief suspicion of incest leading to the brink of catastrophe is quickly dispelled when Wilhelmine learns that she was exchanged after the birth and that she was actually the daughter of Spanish noblemen is. What at first glance looks like an overuse of every probability principle is actually aimed at the core message of the piece:The Enlightenment ideas of the transparency of the world and of human reason turn out to be dubious in view of the complexity of modernity that is unfolding at the same time. In the age of social and spatial mobility and increasingly fluid identities, it is never quite clear who got involved with whom and when, and what consequences all of this may have.
Lenz packs this new confusion of the world into a spectacle that moves beyond all classic genre rules, which Dörte Lyssewski stages as furiously as confidently in her directorial debut: the flying scene changes accompanied by the whirring of strings and percussion, the dynamic-minimalist stage, but above all the highly expressive The game, which despite all the brawls and fainting spells, never slips into slapstick, transform the almost three-hour long performance into an entertaining and intense evening of theater.
In the famous self-review of his work, the German dramatists have to write both funny and dramatic at the same time, "because the people they write for are such a mishmash of culture and rawness, morality and savagery".
The visualization of one's own affiliation to this "mishmash", which also allows Prince Tandi to take a position beyond the airy utopias of the perfect person or fatalistic swan songs on them, can be considered a skeptical and sensible morality of this enormously contemporary piece - and a small lesson for the western defenders and hyper-moralists of our time, too.