The Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus brought “Identitti” to the stage, the novel by Mithu Sanyal, which was published by Hanser in the spring, in an adaptation of the author.
What has changed as a result of the change of genre?
The transformation of the work can be reduced to the formula of an inverted cosmogony: the path leads from successive to confusion.
Patrick Bahners
Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.
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In an interview, Mithu Sanyal said in the style of a literature professor that her novel is formally oriented “on classical Anglo-Saxon literature with a plot and tangible characters and dialogues”.
The story of the scandal surrounding the Düsseldorf star professor Saraswati, who faked her Indian origin, indicated by the name of the Hindu goddess of wisdom, is told chronologically, from the perspective of the impostor's favorite student.
Extensive flashbacks, in particular to the childhood of this student Nivedita, who has had her Indian name since she was born because her father came from India, are marked as clearly as pedestrian crossings according to German road traffic regulations in accordance with realistic conventions.
The inventions of the dentist's daughter
Nivedita has an avatar for digital communication and publishing purposes. As a blogger, she operates under the obscene name from the word game hell that gives the novel its title. Your literary work samples are typographically separated. Sub-chapters are dated according to the distance between the event and the triggering event, the revelation that the real name of the Indian Athena who migrated to Germany is Sarah Vera Thielmann and is the daughter of a dentist from Karlsruhe. In the literary world there is a separatism of distinct events. What was wrong with Saraswati? We should experience everything - one by one.
On the stage of the Small House on Gustaf-Gründgens-Platz, it's not just the scenes that are merged. The rooms of Nivedita's student flat share - on the left her bedroom with the bed made of pallets, on the right the kitchen with the table for the palaver - form the side wings of Saraswati's stately professor's apartment with a panoramic view of the Düsseldorf television tower. The scenes also merge into one another.
Kieran Joel's production is well received by the premiere audience.
One would like to assume that most viewers know the novel or at least the plot from one of the many articles about the novel, a final candidate for the German Book Prize 2021.
In the book, the classic Anglo-Saxon, themed, leisurely flow of text in the narrative is interrupted by tweets and Facebook messages supplied by real colleagues from Sanyal and Saraswati such as Berit Glanz and Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky.
In the theater, the comments run as a background film.
This simultaneity comes closer to the real-time experience of a net civil war, but unprepared visitors are likely to overwhelm the parallel study of the spoken text and the projected paratexts.