If someone manages to move from the countryside to the city to become a scientist or a writer, isn't it a disproportionate burden on those left behind and a waste of scarce resources?
The Russian literary anatomist of historical intervals, Anton Chekhov, almost forces this idea on the audience in his tragic comedy “Uncle Vanya”.
Kerstin Holm
Editor in the Feuilleton.
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The drama revolves around a retired scholar who returns to the country estate that funded his city life, where he is admired and the daily routine tailored to suit his needs.
But his brother-in-law, who manages the estate, realizes that his pretentious main beneficiary has mainly compiled what is alien and has left nothing of his own.
The doctor who treats the professor's ailments is a prophetic climate activist who rails against the destruction of forests and nature in the name of destructive progress.
But both the philosophizing doctor and the down-to-earth Uncle Wanja, as the administrator is known in the family, are magnetized by the professor's beautiful young wife and his big-city trophy, which conquers men's hearts.
The director Jan Bosse, whose new production of the play opens the season at the Frankfurter Schauspiel, stages it as a dialogue drama that circles on the spot.
For this purpose, his stage designer Stéphane Laimé has placed a kind of huge allotment hut made of scaffolding and shelving on the revolving stage, which circulates and opens up new insights into dreams of refuge covered with plastic tarpaulins and furnished with garden chairs.
The beautiful Helena in the Russian provinces
The character of Wanja is embodied by Heiko Raulin with suspenders and sweaty strands of hair as a loyal worker.
His self-esteem seems to make him rebellious.
The scholar, who is part of the family as a widower of Wanja's deceased sister and father of his niece Sonja, is played by Peter Schröder as a solarium-tanned senior dressman who constantly wears new suits in poisonous fluorescent colors.
With a record frequency of hyper-fashionable outfits, the costume designer Kathrin Plath turns his second wife Elena, whom Melanie Straub gives smug statuesqueness, into a two-legged work of art.
How the beautiful Helena, as she also addresses Vanja, makes the poor heroes obedient, is bizarrely funny.
Perhaps the strongest actress of the two-hour evening is Lotte Schubert as the half-orphan Sonja, a simple worker bee like her uncle, who is passionately and hopelessly in love with the doctor and is not even noticed by him.
The way Schubert, who appears as a clumsy provincial carnation with a curly wig and flower dress, wants to entertain her beloved, anticipates his words with a mute movement of the lips, only to brood sorrowfully again, is a touching expression of naïve total devotion.
The vodka rush is reminiscent of life itself
Wolfram Koch portrays the doctor Astrow as a village anarchist who, with an extra-long mustache, struts across the stage like a mixture of emaciated Obelix and Cossack and always blows the paper horn when he circles the revolving stage and exits by bicycle.
He, too, gets infected by the vodka bliss on Wanja’s large construction site, but while the effect of the alcohol reminds him of “life” as such, the doctor estimates that he is able to perform the most difficult operations while intoxicated and that he becomes aware of his own benefit to people .
Nothing in Bosse seems Russian at first, the characters wear jeans and western boots, the live musicians Carolina Bigge and Ralf Göbel set loose electric guitar accents and carry the ensemble when everyone fights their frustration with the dance song "Scheißegal".
Schubert, who curses her (only alleged) “ugliness” by shining a spotlight on her face from below, finally renounces her passion and heartrendingly intones the Joy Division song “Love will tear us apart”.
Even Straub's made-up statue of Elena shows feelings in the form of anger at not being left alone as a woman;
In addition, since Schubert's Sonja confided in her, she investigates the doctor, who then only passionately hugs her.
A scandal erupts when the scholar, bored with country life, wants to sell the property for shares.
Raulin's peace-loving Vanya explodes, because that would have ruined his many years of work and made other residents of the estate homeless, such as his mother (as the careless matron: Christina Geiße) or the impoverished neighbor Telegin (as the sensitive little one with a skirt and earrings: Torsten Flassig).
Raulin chases Schröder in front of him with pistol shots.
He decides to leave.
Theatrical snow settles on the final picture, the figures make skating movements.
So finally: a bit of Russian winter dreariness, but Sonja and Vanja finally make sense of it - in a prospect of endless working days that only the afterlife will reward.