Being your slave, what should I do?

Nicola Hümpel brings Shakespeare's sonnets to the stage. There is never any need to justify staging William Shakespeare. In special cases even his famous sonnets can be brought to the stage. This strictly structured lyric poetry shares the theatrical format of the great Englishman's plays. His sonnets count among the works that have been translated into more languages than any other. Nicola Hümpel has selected ten of the 154 sonnets. For those alone there are five different translators. This Halle puppet theatre and Nico and the Navigators coproduction both charms and challenges the audience with its celebration of bilingualism. It doesn't use surtitles, but rather the German version of the English original is also present as a kind of dialogue or echo. A dapper Adrian Gillot uses something like word choreography to slip in the English version. In a shaggy grey wig and with a penetrating voice he delivers a performance that is full of feeling. And then along comes Sebastan Fortak, wearing a white tutu over a run-of-the-mill brown suit, to brood over the whole thing in German. Sometimes a wonderful half-body puppet of an old man makes an appearance: a true master of the art of lip-syncing and even able stick to his tongue out. Otherwise it is people who populate Oliver Proske's sparse Shakespearean stage. A prison tower can be constructed from its hardwood flooring when sonnet 57 reads "Being your slave, what should I do?". All this produces a strange yet intimate atmosphere which is due in large part to the sound, provided live by Sebastian Herzfeld, which does however tend to over-dominate at the point of crescendo. Yet there is a rest here too, only not one of silence like in Hamlet but one of mystery, as to whom the “I” of the poems is actually addressing. Perhaps the tears we imagine the poet crying made the lines he was writing run. In any case that's what Nils Dreschke speculates, in his lawyer-like representation of the readers of today. He has marked the sonnets that he was able to understand at once. That there are only three of them is a gag with a deeper meaning. And a comfort. In that they are not exactly easy to understand. Not in English or in German. But Nicola Hümpel has a sure sense of timing when it comes to granting respite, stepping outside of things or sticking her oar in. As she does via the wonderful Steffi König. When she looks into the abyss of the soul, wrenched apart in ten sonnets, she doesn't react with the melancholy of her colleagues, rather she carries on with her weird Nina-Hagen-like voice, explosive presence and infernal laughter. Three years ago at the Berliner Ensemble, Robert Wilson and Rufus Wainwright gave us a theatrical interpretation of the sonnets that was rich with images, and in so doing brought the inner world to the exterior. In Halle they're trying it the other way around. Here you should be able to hear the scratching of the quill on paper. And it can be heard. The sonnets are printed in the programme. In English and in German. If you read them beforehand you'll have an easier time of it on the night. And if you don't, you'll be saving the pleasure for afterwards, when you'll be able to pore over them and let the words linger on in your mind.

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