Lying is flying

„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)”.

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