This theater joke has become a dictum.

As if by magic, the following appears on the curtain: "God is dead. Nietzsche." And a few seconds later: "Nietzsche is dead. God." The "Goldberg Variations" by George Tabori, premiered in 1991, are a grandiosely intricate, entertaining game about religion, the Bible and the cruelty of people towards one another.

Above all, however, they are: theater within a theatre.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

  • Follow I follow

Comedy isn't exactly the field Data Tavadze is known for.

The young director, born in 1989, caused an international sensation with his adaptation of the Euripides tragedy "The Trojan Women".

Giving a voice to the women of the post-Soviet phase of Georgia, the victims of war and violence, through the ages to the present day, brought him and his independent ensemble, the Royal District Theater, a lot of attention in 2016.

And Tavadze received numerous invitations as a guest director, especially to Germany and to German-speaking theaters.

"After Party/After Life" about war veterans and their sons premiered in 2018 at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin.

"Germany has been very generous to me in recent years, it has become my second place of work," says Tavadze.

The "Trojans" were about a war on the edge of Europe - in his homeland.

Tavadze, born in 1989, comes from Georgia and lives and works in his hometown of Tbilisi for about half the year.

He's been working with the same team "forever"; they work together like a family; the Royal District is a "loud, active, provocative theatre," always fighting, ever since he was a student, he says.

Which always causes difficulties for him and the team.

Not bad at all if you as a director have good international connections.

For a good ten years he has been working closely with the author and dramaturge Davit Gabunia and the musician Nika Pasuri, who often travel with him abroad. Pasuri is now also part of the party in Frankfurt.

"Not a Funny Happy Piece"

But, says Tavadze, it is also about man's first murder, about violence and death.

"It's not a funny, happy play." And he certainly couldn't imagine staging purely entertaining and funny material.

Theater that aims for nothing beyond entertainment is not Tavadze's thing.

The play was selected by Schauspiel Frankfurt, where Tavadze is now staging for the first time, together with him, but more than two years ago, in March 2020. At that time it was not clear how the situation would develop after Corona, what then topics could be.

"I thought it was all over with the pandemic - but then came the war."

A war that is very close for Tavadze, who works with his ensemble at the Royal District Theater for at least half the year.

Georgia, which itself has fresh experience of conflict with Russia with the war of 2008, is experiencing the war in Ukraine at close quarters - and fears that it may soon itself be a target of attack.

The planned referendum that was supposed to cede South Ossetia to Russia has just been called off, and the situation is difficult.

"There isn't a balcony that isn't decorated in blue and yellow, there are many refugees and a lot of relief efforts," he says, describing the atmosphere in Tbilisi.

Theater as a sanctuary

Above all, however, is this fear that paralyzes, says Tavadze.

"It is the greatest enemy of our freedom." It also means that the country remains conservative, that democratization is inhibited.

At the same time, the Georgians are very courageous, not a day goes by without demonstrations.

He and his team have always made political, contemporary and committed theatre;

the theatre, says Tavadze, who comes from a family of actors, “was always the freest art”, even in Soviet times.

He also studied acting, "because the teachers were better there," he says with a smile, but he always knew that he would become a director.

"It was clear to me that something was happening in the theater that doesn't exist anywhere else." He was always in doubt, but at the same time he believed in the utopia of the theatre.

And now you look at the theaters in Mariupol and Kyiv, they are shelters for people, both in a real and in an ideal sense.

Theater is even played in the bunkers, says Tavadze.

For him, there is no question that theaters have to fulfill an enormously important function in society.

His goal every time is to create a “celebration of community” for a limited time, he says.

The fact that making the theater in Tabori's "Goldberg Variations" also appears like an act of creation brings the material, which at first glance seems distant, very close to what Tavadze always wants to achieve: to find a language and forms for what seems untold, unpresentable .

Especially now, under these extreme conditions.

Basically, that's what Tabori is all about, says Tavadze.

The Goldberg Variations, Schauspiel Frankfurt, Kammerspiele, premiere on June 10, 8 p.m.