Munich premieres: In the wake of lost paradises

The base instinct celebrates two premieres at Munich's Residenztheater: Lydia Steier inspires with “Der Drang” by Franz Xaver Kroetz, Evgeny Titov with Eugene O'Neill's “Gier unter Ulmen”.

In the theoretical capacity for practical reason, the human loss of self-control differs from the animal instinct.

That is why urge and greed are deeply human offenses, Adam and Eve already gave in to them, the biblical commandments condemn them.

But what does the fat cemetery gardener do as a little man in his cramped, dull, monotonous life?

He plants himself in a new Eden and celebrates urge and greed in it.

The human immoderation

Two premieres at the Munich Residenz Theater put human excess into the limelight last weekend.

In the Marstall, the light bulb carousel of the American opera director Lydia Steier revolved around his post-sex-revolutionary liberation grotesque “Der Drang” (1972/1994) in the presence of theater veteran Franz Xaver Kroetz.

In the Residenztheater, Evgeny Titov presented the stony materialism dystopia “Greed under Elms” (1924) by four-time Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winner Eugene O'Neill (1888–1953) as the darkest tragedy of an elementary interpersonal imbalance of envy and desire.

110 minutes of urge and 110 minutes of greed - two evenings of theater that couldn't be more different.

The contrast program was coincidence: the Kroetz premiere was postponed for two years due to the pandemic and most recently due to illness.

Now the comic was directly opposed to the tragic extreme, and yet they were united by the futile longing for ideal and illusion, blind longing, failure in reality.

On top of that, both have a clear, strong, stringent staging style.

Lustfully love-mad, obsessively violent, murderously jealous: in Lydia Steier's "Drang" the border-breaking intrusion into the private sphere of another takes place in the exaggeration.

Christoph Franken, Nicola Kirsch, Vincent Glander and Liliane Amuat form a stunningly funny eighties quartet in which the family relationships around a couple who work as cemetery gardeners, their brother-in-law and his lover are not at all right.

But what doesn't fit is made to fit - the dwarf proportions in the four cake slice rooms on the stage and the deformations in Blake Palmer's fat suit costumes are symptomatic of this.

Only Fritz, exhibitionist and morbidly sexually attracted to all the little monochrome teddy bears in his former monochrome nursery, stubbornly goes his own way.

"I don't want to be happy"

"I don't want to be happy - not because of you." With these cold words, Eben also resists the superficial temptation in "Gier unter Ulmen".

Evgeny Titov leads the audience away from O'Neill's setting, New England around 1850, away from any supposed idyll under the elm trees.

In its place, stage designer Duri Bischoff created rugged black slate rocks as a sharp-edged apocalyptic backdrop that, in contrast to Caspar David Friedrich's associated seas of ice and fog, has nothing romantically promising about it.

As a result, the text loses its American character and gains tension and transcendence.

Surrounded by high, inhospitable stone wall ruins, in a twilight without seasons or times of day, people vegetate here who are perhaps the last of their kind.

Eva Dessecker dresses Simon Zagermann and Niklas Mitteregger in such a neglected way that the dumb brothers Simeon and Peter, both in their late thirties, appear to be beyond civility.

Peter greedily licks fresh blood from a sheep's carcass, and their former home suddenly seems bombed out.

For their vision of finding happiness in the "Golden West", they seem to have to cross more continents than just the American one these days.

Her half-brother Eben, 25, whose beloved mother and owner of the farm died at the will of father Ephraim, is the legal heir.

But Ephraim's third wife, Abbie, half his age, is now taking possession.

O'Neill's greed doesn't stop at love, and Evgeny Titov doesn't stop at the sun either.

Because everyone revolves around themselves here: Abbie, who plays off her feminine charms, who, in addition to all her addiction to dominance, also gives Pia Händler a quiet, sensitive conscience;

old Ephraim Cabot, who, thanks to Oliver Stokowski's portrayal, with every step and every blow of the hammer you can see that he has overcome his frailty in favor of an unbroken, godly hardness;