Robert Lepage is directing the film in Germany for the first time in 40 years. From a game of cards, he and the Schaubühne ensemble developed a five-hour, magical melodrama about “faith, money, war and love” in 80 years of German history. By Barbara Behrendt
Four LED images hang from the stage and glow in the dark. Four playing cards. We still only see their backs. But these digital light windows soon reveal strands of fate that are all interwoven with each other. Monastery windows appear, later book walls, café facades, the menus of a snack bar, the display boards at the airport.
A stage setting like a magical deck of cards
They rotate horizontally and vertically, like a Rubik’s cube. The animated image of the slot machine flashes and sounds as if it reacts to the buttons that Stephanie Eidt presses. The shots that Christoph Gawenda later fires at the illuminated target are actually virtually etched into the image. An aesthetic that is as simple as it is tricky and ingenious, designed by the director and set designer Robert Lepage (with Ulla Willis).
Four pictures, four playing cards, four trumps: “Believe Money, War and Love” is the name of the production, whose four storylines Lepage developed together with the Schaubühne ensemble. It is a coup that the director Thomas Ostermeier, after 20 years of digging, was able to bring the French-Canadian, world-famous director to Germany – Lepage is staging his work in Berlin for the first time.
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From the nunnery to the casino to Afghanistan
The evening tells stories from 80 years of German history in four acts. It starts with faith – trump cross. A dark-skinned baby is given to a nunnery near Wiesbaden during the American occupation in 1945. As a young girl, she goes to Paris, becomes a model, gets pregnant and also gives her own twin babies away: to an orphanage. Trumpf Geld moves forward to the 1990s in Baden-Baden, where a woman gambles away her Nazi family inheritance in the casino. In Pik and with it war, her son is later the focus: he comes back traumatized as a veteran from Afghanistan, the year is 2011. He meets his comrade, Trumpf Herz begins, in Berlin when he and his husband hire a Ukrainian surrogate mother – but before the birth date, the Russian invasion follows on February 24, 2022.
All characters are interwoven on different time levels; Lepage tells us about the magical coincidences that move the world forward. For example, the former model, herself an orphan, who gave her own children to an orphanage – and 30 years later accidentally dragged her own son away at a fundraising gala.
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Oh, these people
Magicians put on a show for the audience, characters are tempted by the devil and guided by fortune tellers. A great, magical melodrama that tells its fairytale stories with a wink and an ironic shrug: oh, these people.
With just a few precise, perfect movements, Lepage creates a wide variety of sceneries. A few chairs, oval windows on the screens, and you’re sitting on the plane with the characters. The large technical crew remains hidden, only the ensemble brings in chairs and tables, the images rotate silently in the dark as if it were magic. Lepage deserves his reputation as a stage magician and as the inventor of great poetic images. And is celebrated with a standing ovation.
Outstanding ensemble
The ensemble clearly has a lot of fun with the many suffering and at the same time slightly ridiculous characters who swap hundreds of costumes and wigs in rapid succession, sometimes every minute. Everything meshes together like clockwork in this truly outstanding, realistic-psychological ensemble work: Bastian Reiber, Stephanie Eidth, Stefan Stern, Alina Vimbai Strähler, Christoph Gawenda, Damir Avdic and Magdalena Lermer – all impressive.
The amount of time Lepage takes to play out the scenes is completely un-German and uneconomical. Some only consist of a train journey. The landscape passes by the windows. Someone is singing a song. Completely unnecessary to the plot. But this creates the long, epic flow that carries you warmly and reliably through the five hours. Not a second is boring or superfluous. Like a series, you binge-watch your way through the four parts and marvel at the stage wonders.
Scene with Stephanie Eidt and Christoph Gawenda
Theater as communion, not as communication
However, much of the content remains disappointing. Lepage tells over 80 years of German history only vaguely, stereotypically and with ancient images. Apparently he only associates Germany with the casino in Baden-Baden, Berlin-Alexanderplatz and a bit of the GDR. And does it really make sense to tell the Ukrainian war through the story of surrogacy? And the Afghanistan mission about the loss of a beloved dog?
The evening can’t keep up with his masterpiece “The Seven Streams Of The River Ota”: a seven-hour, moving epic about American history. After 30 years, the production could be seen at the Schaubühne in 2022 – still a work of the century.
But Lepage is not taken lightly. Because, as he once told me in an interview, his theater is not about communication, but about communion. About coming together. Sitting together in the theater, laughing and crying together. It is celebrated in the most beautiful way in this very humane, humorous, highly entertaining and loving evening.
Broadcast: rbb24 Inforadio, October 4th, 2024, 7:55 a.m
