Lisa Nielebock, who has to balance family and a directing professorship at the Folkwang University with practice, chooses very carefully what she stages each season.

After a few exchanges of words between these four little people on the long catwalk, it quickly becomes clear why they have chosen Goethe's novel “Die Elected Affinities” in the Frankfurter Schauspiel.

Here and there, the language may give a hint that it does not come from the here and now.

The torn people, who between self-fulfilment, passion and duty do more harm than good to themselves, come across as extremely contemporary.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It is not about what is generally human, but about what happens through modern humanity in terms of unhappiness, standing in one's own way, self-deception.

Contemporaneity was already a topic for Goethe, now it is trigger words such as election or divorce that crystallize what Nielebock is all about in this evening, which only lasts 70 minutes.

It is a chamber play in every respect, the theater has been cleared with a footbridge in the middle of the stalls.

Game of key phrases

In this way, the characters come close to the small audience: there is the reasonable Charlotte, whose restrained passion and soon the pain are shown in looks and gestures (Manja Kuhl), there is the energetic, pragmatic Otto (Thorsten Flassig), whose image of women on the second Look a little condescending, there is Charlotte's husband Eduard (Heiko Raulin), whose egocentricity even leads to some giggles in the audience, and his lover, the young Ottilie (Marta Kizyma), you don't really know what to make of this mixture of angular subservience and hysteria that doesn't really fit in with the other three.

Basically, only the rough plot is told, the theory of affinity, cross love, complications, infant death, double exitus.

The novel becomes a game of key sentences that alternates between internal and external perspectives, I and he.

The contemporary human that interests Nielebock becomes vivid with soft music, with gestures and with turning away or coming closer on the catwalk, despite the scarcity of means.

And even the rather over-excited stylistic device of writing over some stage element has a purpose: the charcoal abrasion of the pens gradually colors the protagonists' hands, faces and light-colored clothing.

Nobody, it shows, comes out unscathed and unsullied from a life in which free decisions and passions are allowed.

“Elective Affinities”, Schauspiel Frankfurt, next performance on July 8th at 7.30 p.m.