Radialsystem Berlin: music and technological opulence
“Quartett zum Quadrat” after Heiner Müller and two string quartets by Leoš Janáček – concept, direction, costumes Nicola Hümpel, set and video technology Oliver Proske, music Kuss Quartett
The idea of combining Heiner Müller’s play, often staged in the German-speaking world, with the two rather rarely performed string quartets by Leoš Janáček seems abstract and enticing at the same time. Quartett is a two-person play in which a man and a woman, in the course of a relentless battle of the sexes, also play two other women for each other, swapping genders, until the man, dying, is defeated in the role of a woman – in Müller’s mocking self-assessment, a mixture of Jean Genet’s The Maids and the Peter Alexander film farce Charley’s Aunt from 1963. Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata, in turn, goes back to a story by Tolstoy in which Beethoven’s sonata of the same title is the accompanying music to an adultery story, in which the Czech composer above all felt the misfortune of the punished woman. To square these two pieces of contrasting temperament, as devised by Andreas Hillger, dramaturg of Nico and the Navigators, is therefore an enormous leap, or rather a split.
On the other hand, such combinations are precisely the speciality of Nico and the Navigators, in order playfully to overcome conventional modes of performance and, in the process, to blow works apart. Thus at first two figures lie entangled in one another under a gauze hood as if in a snakes’ egg, a slanting surface above them serving as a mirror that doubles them both. The Kuss Quartet, with Jana Kuss (violin), plays the first movement of the Kreutzer Sonata standing – the whole arrangement highly artificial and cool.
With the entrance of Annedore Kleist as Merteuil and Martin Clausen as Valmont, a different note is struck by their costumes. In Müller’s text they consider “rubbing their furs against each other” as an expression for animalistic sex. Nicola Hümpel has costumed Merteuil with snakeskin boots and a fox collar of the kind worn decades ago by pensioners who could not afford a fur coat. Clausen’s Valmont, by contrast, wears Atze Schröder-style aviator glasses and a sort of polar bear coat as a sign of his run-down life as a seducer. Admittedly, Müller’s stage direction “a salon before the French Revolution, a bunker after the Third World War” leaves the placing of the characters largely open, but here trash is supposed to caricature what is inside – which in turn stands in a certain contrast to Müller’s deliberately obscene language that celebrates every humiliation. To match this, or perhaps rather not, Clausen plays a drunken, dying Valmont at the end, half slurring his words.
But there are also levels of a different format. When, for example, Martin Buczko and Yui Kawaguchi, as male and female dancers, double the other couple to form a real quartet. Or when Paul Hübner on trumpet and Lorenzo Riessler on percussion set a sound world of tensely jazzy tones against the Kuss Quartet. Disparateness thus seems to be the principle.
One technical and visual high point is provided by Oliver Proske’s mirror wall, which can also be a screen for close-ups of the faces of Valmont and Merteuil, and furthermore a window into a virtual 3D world in which the bunker suggested by Müller can be entered – and in which the two dancers, at one point, disappear entirely with their whole bodies. Very impressive.
However, this technical and musical opulence does not lead to a thorough exploration of the play, for the text here is only one part of a vast apparatus which, with the cameras, also forces the acting style of the two characters towards them and makes the music appear dominant. It certainly has great visual value, but the almost two and a half hours (probably the longest Quartett production there has ever been) nonetheless slow down the impact that ought to emanate from Müller’s play.
<< Back to press overview