Radialsystem Berlin – Leoš Janáček Meets Heiner Müller Nico and the Navigators stage Müller’s two-person drama Quartett to Janáček’s string quartets.
In 1980, Heiner Müller presented Quartett, a chamber play of austere intensity: a two-person drama based on Pierre Choderlos de Laclos’ famous epistolary novel Dangerous Liaisons, which was adapted for Hollywood in 1988 starring Glenn Close and John Malkovich. Müller sharpens the play’s focus entirely on the antagonists Marquise de Merteuil and Vicomte de Valmont. The double indication of place and time — “salon before the French Revolution / bunker after the Third World War” — intertwines courtly decadence with an apocalyptic atmosphere.
The plot, too, is reduced to its essentials. Merteuil and Valmont play with and against one another, continuously assuming the roles of other characters — such as Madame de Tourvel or the young Volanges — in order to test power, desire, and self-assertion in the other. Language becomes a battlefield, eroticism a strategy. Beneath the precisely honed dialogue lies the weariness that has long overtaken the entangled pair. At the same time, the play is permeated by a dry, at times macabre humor that renders the abyss all the more sharply defined.
The Berlin-based independent music theatre ensemble Nico and the Navigators takes on this demanding material, interweaving it with both of Leoš Janáček’s string quartets. Their eruptive, nervously flickering musical language does not function as illustrative accompaniment, but as a contrapuntal echo of the text. On stage, two pairs encounter one another in a dialogue of word and body: actors Annedore Kleist and Martin Clausen, alongside the dance duo Yui Kawaguchi and Martin Buczko. Kleist shapes inner fractures — between superiority and vulnerability — through richly varied facial expression, while Clausen counters existential gravity with comic precision. Kawaguchi articulates the work’s emotional undercurrents through highly virtuosic, sharply contoured movement, complemented by Buczko’s insistent physicality.
Musically, a broadly conceived acoustic space emerges. Paul Hübner (trumpet, electronics) and Lorenzo Riessler (percussion) combine electronic soundscapes with signal motifs and driving rhythmic patterns. Particularly in the dance sequences, this creates a pulsating dialogue between stage and music that never slips into mere effect, remaining firmly committed to the piece’s inner tension. The Kuss Quartet, interpreting Janáček’s highly expressive music with assurance, also joins the action, at times becoming part of the stage event itself.
Nicola Hümpel is responsible for direction, concept, and costumes. She programmatically takes up Müller’s gender reversals: men in dresses — not only within the dance duo but also among the string players — mirror the text’s shifts of identity. The decision is neither garish nor provocative, but integrates seamlessly into the play with masks and reflections.
A stylistic rupture does occur, however, when Clausen, in Valmont’s death scene, slips into casual colloquial German; here, the production unnecessarily departs from Müller’s elaborately crafted language.
By contrast, Oliver Proske’s stage design stands out positively. Composed of semi-transparent, angled mirror surfaces and precisely integrated video elements, it creates a visual echo of the doublings already inherent in the text: bodies appear real, mirrored, and estranged.
In a sold-out Radialsystem, this intense and multilayered performance rightly concluded with enthusiastic applause. The premiere discussed here took place on 4 December 2025 at Radialsystem, followed by further performances on 5, 6, and 7 December.