„Quartett", Heiner Müller’s distillation of Choderlos de Laclos’ "Dangerous Liaisons" – about the cynical power and erotic games of the corrupt court society in pre-revolutionary France – already pushes things to the limit of what is bearable. But Nico and the Navigators want more.

Why “squared”? Heiner Müller’s Quartett is already, in itself, about as much as one can endure: this distillate of Choderlos de Laclos’ Dangerous Liaisons, this cynical sexual campaign of annihilation stripped of the veiling elegance of Laclos’ epistolary novel. Nico and the Navigators top it at Berlin’s Radialsystem – or rather, they attempt the quadrature of this vicious game. Theatre to the power of dance to the power of music. It is too much.

Animalistic hunting instinct

It is a pleasure to watch Martin Clausen and above all Annedore Kleist in the roles of the seasoned seduction monster Valmont and his embittered accomplice Merteuil. One would dearly like to say that Heiner Müller’s play has aged badly in the 21st century – after #MeToo and Epstein, in view of the ongoing scandal that is Trump and the horror at the crimes committed against Gisèle Pelicot and far too many other women. But Valmont’s perfidy and Merteuil’s cynicism still hit the blackest of nerves – is what Valmont does really so very different from today’s grooming? – and Clausen and Kleist are simply very good in their shifting roles, with her being the better Valmont than he is a Madame Tourvel.

For as long as they are not taking their clothes off, both of them are draped in a lot of dead animal: fox fur collars, fur coats, snakeskin boots, as if the mercilessly animalistic nature of their hunting instinct still had to be underlined. Here too: it is too much.

Weightless in the tilting mirror

For the evening, the chamber play of the Kleist–Clausen duo plus the Kuss Quartett ensemble would have been more than enough. The string quartet, dressed in cassocks, drops in passages from Leoš Janáček’s quartets Kreutzer Sonata and Intimate Letters, which seem less to underscore the action than to comment on it in real time – nervous and feverish, yearningly post-Romantic, shimmering, cool or luxuriant. Nico and the Navigators want more. They complicate their Laclos–Müller adaptation with a tiltable glass set element that functions in turn as mirror, as simple pane of glass and as projection surface onto which 2D and 3D image sequences are played. It is sophisticated and offers plenty for the eye. Movements that the dance duo Yui Kawaguchi and Martin Buczko execute lying on the floor appear almost weightless in the tilting mirror: lying is flying.

Striking effects, rumbling sounds

In other scenes, Kawaguchi and Buczko wander through a virtual staircase, pantomiming their way down steps that exist only on film. Striking effects, but ones that could just as easily be used in any other piece. They contribute little to the interpretation of the Quartett constellation of characters. And as if the Janáček string quartets could not carry the piece, as if the Kuss Quartett – and the additionally deployed trumpet-and-percussion duo – were not enough, the acoustic interstices have to be permanently filled with ominously rumbling sounds. It is too much.

Sardonic humour

Those who expose themselves to the Laclos–Müller duo know what they are in for: the piece leaves nothing out, from sexual perversion to desecration of corpses and faecal disgust, all the way to the suicide of Madame Tourvel in an alcohol- and blood-soaked frenzy. The performers on stage spare neither themselves nor their audience. The strength of the production is that, despite everything, it never loses its sense of play, its sardonic humour. Its weakness is the excess.

Review round-up

Sören Kittel of the Berliner Morgenpost (5 December 2025) encountered an “exuberantly powerful production in images and sound”, indeed an “explosion of creativity” at the Radialsystem. Heiner Müller’s “crude texts” were, he wrote, “presented precisely and in all their rawness”.

For Andreas Montag of the Mitteldeutsche Zeitung (6 December 2025) it was “a very strong evening”. The team confronts Müller’s text “with the emotional string quartets of Leoš Janáček (played live by the Kuss Quartet), jazz by Paul Hübner (trumpet, sounds) and Lorenzo Riessler (percussion), as well as the furious dancing of Martin Buczko and Yui Kawaguchi)”.

Berlin’s off-music theatre is quaking: Nico and the Navigators link Müller’s dystopian endgame „Quartett" with Janáček’s string quartets

The performance is truly too beautiful to be real: “Man and woman and woman and man / reach toward divinity.” Even in the Bible, where God in heaven famously plays a leading role, significant doubts arose centuries earlier about Schikaneder’s anachronistic concept of love; in Matthew 5:28 we find both the specific occasion and the general rationale: “But I tell you, anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.” Countless touches, countless events have transpired.

And who knows this better than Vicomte Valmont and his companion, the Marquise de Merteuil—the diabolical duo from Choderlos de Laclos’ 1782 epistolary novel "Les Liaisons dangereuses", which Heiner Müller honored two centuries later in his play „Quartett", transforming it into a dialectically dense dystopia in which horrific regression turns into fascination. Few plays are as cynically nihilistic and brutally inhuman in dialogue as this one. Even fewer replace every question mark with a period, as here. All doubts are removed; the claustrophobic setting—both a “salon before the French Revolution” and a “bunker after the Third World War”—and its inhabitants know no future. Everything is broken. Fascinatingly broken. An endgame with two protagonists who feel Lacanian jouissance only in imitating one another (hence the title Quartett). Thus, in the destruction of all they may once have longed for.

Luca Francesconi set Müller’s piece to music in 2011 as an opera in thirteen scenes, writing the libretto himself. Following Rihm’s „Hamletmaschine" (1983) and Dusapin’s „Medeamaterial"(1992), this was another successful attempt to translate the playwright’s hermetic text blocks into sound. In all three cases, dissonance functions as both musical and semantic-semiotic idiom; the stage works embrace Müller’s rhetorical rigor. The music theatre company Nico and the Navigators, always searching for alternative forms and formats, now takes a different path. In their new work, somewhat awkwardly titled "Quartett zum Quadrat", they interlace Müller’s play with Leoš Janáček’s two string quartets.

The dramaturg Andreas Hillger’s idea (who, reportedly, left the project after a dispute with director Nicola Hümpel, after which Sergio Morabito stepped in) is not without urgency: Janáček’s string quartets deal, more or less directly, with precarious love affairs ending in misfortune. The first piece is named after Tolstoy’s grim tale "The Kreutzer Sonata", in which a certain Pozdnyshev kills his wife upon discovering her affair with the violinist Truchatschevsky; the second quartet, "Intimate Letters", is a homage to Kamila Stösslová, nearly forty years his junior, in whom the composer fell hopelessly in love in the late autumn of his life.

The question remains: how can this—especially with the additional musical textures provided by Paul Hübner’s trumpet and percussion compositions, and a choreographic layer from the dance duo Martin Buczkó and Yui Kawaguchi—be made theatrically convincing? Director Hümpel (also responsible for the costumes) and set designer Oliver Proske seek salvation at Berlin’s Radialsystem through visual overload. This produces images of astonishing poetry (especially Proske’s “bunker” videos and mirrored characters are highly imaginative) and, in the intense, intonationally unsettling interpretation of the Kiss Quartet, numerous expressive moments—but the core, Müller’s play, is put at serious risk.

Not only does the work fragment into small mosaic pieces, contrary to Müller’s intention; „Quartett" allows for pauses and fermatas but resists dissolving its hermeticism. Even more problematic is the awkward characterization. Annedore Kleist convincingly portrays Merteuil’s tormented existence, but never truly embodies the Marquise as a nihilist, a wicked woman hating her own decay—a shortcoming emphasized as the actress more convincingly plays the coquettish “chick” Volange. Kleist lacks the hardness, the cold malice Müller wrote into the Marquise (which Glenn Close brilliantly embodied alongside the mischievous John Malkovich in Stephen Frears’ legendary 1994 film adaptation). Martin Clausen, playing Vicomte Valmont, is far more convincing (both wear furs—he in lambskin, she in mink and leopard print, since they “rub against each other’s hides”). A degenerate snob capable of both seduction and debauchery, lord and servant, man and woman. Hilariously comic as he mimics Madame de Tourvel as a Catholic statue—but precisely in this comedy lies danger: it softens what neither Müller, Tolstoy, nor Janáček made unequivocally clear: disillusioned, disruptive, and obstructive relationships yield nothing but pain. When Clausen as Valmont drinks the theater-blood-filled goblet and (perhaps unintentionally) slips into slapstick, it feels somehow wrong—a slapstick amid the tragedy of life.