The best part about the claim is the freedom to make it.
She stands boldly in the room and simply waits, with all her senses, to see what is answered.
It was like that in 400 BC, and it is like that today.
The Swiss author, director and set designer Thom Luz is an artist who has mastered making claims in theater spaces and thereby transforming them into social waiting halls full of strangely comic abysses.
Director Andreas Beck brought him to the Munich Residenztheater.
There he wrote and staged an answer to central motifs of the timeless utopian comedies of Aristophanes for the jewel box of the Cuvilliéstheater: law and rhetoric, democracy and ideal state, capital and justice.
Thoughts on the run
“The clouds, the birds, the wealth” - the Greek triad of titles by the Attic playwright unites “things that dissolve, that flee from us, that are intangible”, says Luz, “a basic human dilemma”. That is why genius and madness are very close to one another in his cloud cuckoo land: the school of thought of Socrates, in which Luz lays his entire ninety-minute “Triptych of the Fugitive”, is reminiscent of a madhouse, the philosophical spirit resembles a nonsense, the sophistic argumentation is a baseless assertion exposed. "The thoughts flee from us - for good reason!"
The figures, walls and props of this emphatically neutral, meaningless scenario are chalk white. Fog puffs out of the huge air cushions with which the occupants of this cloud and think tank - “schoolhouse, blacksmith shop, barn and palace for loose thoughts, fine discourses and inseparable knots” - act in idiosyncratic dance, singing and gymnastics routines. “With us, it's not just the mind that makes capers, the Phrontisterion is also a gymnasium for the convolutions of the brain.” For hundreds of years, as the patina shows.
Only one person brings fresh flesh pink to the group: Pheidippides, the new one. Starting with this figure, Thom Luz interweaves passages from the three Aristophanesian dramas, culminating in the absurd conclusion of a list of what has been learned by the philosopher who is already brainwashed with disarming logic. Luz borrowed him from the parable of justice “The Clouds”, in which the indebted Strepsiades lets his son train with Socrates to be a counter-speaker, who always wins with the weakest argument. A rhetorical weapon that will turn against Strepsiades himself.
To call the illusion and thus ultimately a lie to the truth is also the basic principle of theater.
And so, with Aristophanes as well as Luz, the plot, with its handgrips and mental games of the absurd that are only useful as a pastime, turns out to be a game within the game: “While we hope, we are so stupid as to believe that existence has a meaning.
.
.
If there is no hope, we can at least try to move forward without delusional striving and to live freely. "
Chaos is welcome, order has failed
This is also reflected in the stage, in that its real firewall has been expanded to create a spartan asylum with bare lightbulbs and loudspeakers. The appeal to the "dear citizens" to protest against the hoax of "this whole false world" as a construct of ideas from "badly painted", tax-financed backdrops, sits. For Aristophanes, the path from simplicity to clarity leads through simplicity. It's no different at Thom Luz. But according to the insight "Chaos is welcome, because order has failed", the director superimposes several simplifications into a complex composition of fleeting moments. Even the light, with its often varying moods, acts as an autonomous actor here, which is certainly due to the fact that the costumes also come from Tina Bleuler's hand.The linen-white overalls and health flip-flops reflect the group dynamics and at the same time the autistic individuality in which Mareike Beykirch, Elias Eilinghoff, Steffen Höld, Barbara Melzl, Lisa Stiegler and Cathrin Störmer the agon, the battle of words of antiquity, between the "wisest man of Athens" and his Increase apprentices to recitative obsession.
All of this is accompanied by a conductor figure making music in front of the ramp as if from an orchestra pit.
Under the musical direction of Mathias Weibel, together with four tape recorders and just as many electronic keyboard instruments, Daniele Pintaudi tiles a threateningly lovely, thematically atmospheric mosaic of yesterday and today.
The Munich premiere audience, which was forcibly thinned to a quarter, gave a long, hearty applause.