Meat is beaten.

The drippings are sizzling.

Neon light flickers.

In fact, every decent crime thriller begins at a snack bar.

But it was not foreseeable that the murder would have to happen right next to the sausage stand.

It hit a young woman: she was strangled, the body remained undiscovered, the snow has settled over her body.

This is how this evening of theater begins, which is actually not an evening at the theatre, because this fragment of the piece, with its Dadaist monologues and musical interludes, deconstructs the theater as a linear narrative structure.

Christoph Marthaler shows a hilarious crime persiflage with “The last whistle – a rotary swindle” at the Theater Basel.

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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Juri Bischoff's stage design alone is a provocation.

Like a collage, six snack bars stand next to each other.

Their owners sell sausages, "Woelki Dogs", "Stolzing's tripe" and french fries.

Each booth has its own character, which is introduced from act to act.

In the first act, a news ticker ensures that the story continues.

"Farmer and Poet" by Franz von Suppé runs over the news beam.

A bored Bendix Dethleffsen pushes a piano onto the stage.

With his musical interludes, he is the only continuity on this evening.

"The composer was denied worldwide success because he sold his work for CHF 4 at a weak moment" is written on the conveyor belt.

A ketchup bottle hovers above everything, hanging phallically or transcendentally (depending on your point of view) from the ceiling.

Is this already salvation?

Marthaler's ensemble, which was hit hard by Corona and had little rehearsal time together, is still enthusiastic about playing.

The chicken bones nibbled off by the grumpy snack bar cook (Raphael Clamer) become human bones.

The choir begins and sings softly "Everything has an end, only the sausage has two".

Then church bells ring out.

“Is that already salvation?” asks a customer.

Suddenly, a blend of Cardinal Woelki appears, played by Jean-Pierre Cornu, who is supposed to convert the ensemble and who, in his sermons, is pursued by phallic ketchup.

Church criticism with the fence post...

The evening knows no real action.

The spinning vertigo, known as "Vertigo" from the Hitchcock film of the same name, is a synonym for pure improvisation here, according to the original definition: "an apparent movement between oneself and the environment".

After the murder, the investigation begins.

At some point, the homicide squad follows, the questioning of witnesses, then the ring search - as with file number XY in the 1980s.

Sara Kittelmann's costume design also dates from this period: the police officers wear grass-green uniforms.

Matt colors, gray pant suits and beige trench coats dominate.

The reference to the eighties is also a reference to Marthaler's early works, such as "Stägeli uff, stägeli ab, juhee!", which he brought to the stage with similar Dada anarchism.

When the murder victim (Liliana Bellini) tells his story in Italian, no one listens until the voice stops.

The question “Are you sad?” is asked dozens of times that evening.

The policeman, played in a wonderfully conservative manner by Jürgen Kienberger, suffers from the "gray sadness, the sadness of staples and chewing gum" and really just wants to see his great love, the sausage seller Christel (Nikola Weisse), again.

A flattering satire on the state of the Church

In accordance with his tradition, Marthaler enriches the thriller with choral singing, arias and piano solos.

There are fragments of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and Johannes Brahms, as well as excerpts from prose by Friedrich Dürrenmatt and Andreas Okopenko.

The evening was actually supposed to be dedicated to the late Basel director Werner Düggelin, who discovered Marthaler almost half a century ago.

A three-hour crime story was planned.

But Corona threw a spanner in the works.

The planned long thriller turned into a “collage from the blue-light milieu” and a flattered satire on the state of the church.

"The body lives because it decays," Woelki exclaims.

Later, Marthaler veteran Ueli Jäggi follows, who orders “Chlöpfer” in various, increasingly impolite ways.

But the takeaway vendors, who have seen and experienced it all, remain unfazed and simply close their shutters.

Even when the grinning Woelki, disguised as a crispy roast chicken, struts across the stage, the street-savvy snack bar owners don't even have a weary smile for him.

A final whistle sounds again.

Then the tables continue to turn, but not around.

Christoph Marthaler, who is returning to Basel shortly after his seventieth birthday after a long time, has created another piece of anecdotal history with this comical collage.