The whining depression refrain of the so-called little woman is given right away, as a motto, so to speak: "It's not nice, but you can't do anything".

Dagmar Manzel, who has learned to keep an eye on people's mouths, mumbles it to herself in an endless loop and with numerous nuances of dulled resignation to her own futurelessness, while peeling potatoes at the kitchen table.

After all, like every day, there has to be something to eat on the table at the end.

Will also be.

Namely potato soup, mashed, salted, mixed with crème fraîche.

Can even be eaten.

Manzel and Sylvester Groth spoon it up together.

Manzel, the incomparable, sings "Im Treibhaus" from Richard Wagner's "Wesendonck-Lieder", without accompaniment,

unerringly reaching the right cadences like James Bond in the driver's seat in a convertible when jumping out of the helicopter.

This is La Manzel: the ultimate stuntwoman of German theatre!

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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"Salon before the French Revolution/Bunker after the Third World War" is what Heiner Müller stated for his two-person piece "Quartett", not as a location, that would be a misunderstanding, but as a period of time.

So Manzel and Groth, who have known each other for more than forty years, play in a kitchen with a leather sofa that Jessica Rockstroh set up for them as a stage in the Reichshof cinema in Bayreuth.

It is not "Quartett" that is played, but "After Tristan", but the two are related.

The director Ingo Kerkhof and his dramaturg Gerhard Ahrens have put together a collage of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde", Müller's "Quartett" and August Strindberg's "Totentanz" for the Bayreuth Festival's "Diskurs Bayreuth" series, which is composed by Manzel,

Müller had already written "Quartett" based on Choderlos de Laclos' epistolary novel "Gefahrliche Liaisons" in 1982, but then noticed in 1993, while working on his production of Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" in Bayreuth (with Daniel Barenboim conducting), that "Quartett ' was like a sequel to 'Tristan'.

One only has to assume that Tristan and Isolde would have become a couple, because, according to Müller, nobody really longs for death, "that would be nonsense and romance in a bad sense.

No, the longing for death is the longing for another life.

But if they had succeeded in living together instead of dying,

According to Müller's hypothesis, after ten years of partnership they would have become such wily erotic gamblers as the Marquise de Merteuil and the Comte de Valmont in Laclos' novel about the decadence of the Ancien Régime.

"Tristan und Isolde" would then be the memory of a past that knew more of the future, more fervor for transformation and change than the dialogues of two hopelessly ingenious players with the hearts of those who seem to be backward compared to their level of knowledge.

Manzel and Groth were in the same year at drama school and had already shot their debut film "Fronturlaub" together with Bernd Böhlich in 1981;

Manzel himself played Madame de Merteuil in 1991 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin under Müller's direction.

The virtuoso identification of the game within the game, standing next to the role while being in the role, has become second nature to both of them.

Groth keeps throwing in casual comments about the gameplay: "Something's wrong.

There's something wrong with your hat”, by which he means that Manzel has forgotten the wig, that monstrously curly nonsense of Leibniz hairstyles.

At the next point he just grunts to Manzel "tears".

She said, "Yeah, wait, I'll be right there," then switched to a tearful voice as she read a letter.

On the accordion, Kroll rips shreds of irritating memories from Wagner's "Tristan und Isolde" and transforms them into Slavic-style speedy polkas that could occasionally be paired with Hasidic dances.

In between, Manzel and Groth sing the duet “How are we both noble” from the operetta “Lieselott” by Eduard Künnecke based on the text by Gustaf Gründgens in this insane joke.

Gerhard Ahrens quotes Heiner Müller as saying that "Dangerous Liaisons" also contain clothes like "Charley's Aunt".

Certainly, it's a hilarious outfit on the brink of death.

And you hold your breath when Manzel and Groth ever threaten to die.

The soup is an escape from this art, its consumption a time of respite.