We could of course make it easy for ourselves now. Throw an elegiac look over your right shoulder, back to Erik Charell’s opulent production ninety years ago in the Großer Schauspielhaus zu Berlin, in which a good seven hundred (!) Participants on and behind the stage purred over four hundred sold-out performances in front of three thousand five hundred spectators. And lament that such opulent pleasure orgiasms – despite all the “longing for illusion” (Judith Wiemers in the program) are simply no longer possible today.
Admire human society as much as you will; it will therefore be no less true that it necessarily leads people to hate one another to the extent that their interests intersect, and also to render apparent service to one another, and in reality to inflict all imaginable evils on one another.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau: “Treatise on the Origin and Fundamentals of Inequality Among Men”
Which brings us to the interesting question of why the »Rößl« actually still belongs on the stage of the State Operetta today. Actually, all the authors and interview partners of the program are around them. The conductor Johannes Pell calls the piece a “technically perfect and timeless masterpiece” – which is what it is, if you think about it more closely not is. And the director Toni Burghard Friedrich, when asked about the relevance of the play for the present, takes refuge in common places:
“Here the problems of all those involved are quite commonplace and can therefore be felt by everyone. It’s about work, hierarchies, social differences, and – especially currently – the conflict between wanderlust and staying at home […] Although the ‘Rössl’ is a comedy that thrives on exaggeration, we are often very close to an everyday life that we are also familiar with. “
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Nevertheless, between the lines I sense the timeless question of aesthetic reception. Why should we still list the “Weisse Rößl” today, since it has largely lost its primary functions as an outlet and vehicle for amusement? The result is the visualization of tourist longings and moral errors and confusions, even more, the process of undermining expectations by skillfully pulling the strings of the director (“We have deliberately chosen visual worlds that our viewers expect from a ‘Rössl’ staging – also in order to then question and break them through the bar space and its display.”) in the end in a kind of purification? Just like the Rössl landlady goes through the course of the evening, albeit in an anti-feminist direction: first she slaps the head waiter, who comes too close to her, then dismisses him after countless indecentities and intrusiveness – and only when he is finally out has turned away from her, she writes him a job reference in which she submissively offers him the role of husband. Oh great.
The illusions are fraying
Why doesn’t the production ignite anyway? It is, I think, because of their inability to do that something for something to enter with the work: the “Willful suspension of disbelief” (Samuel Coleridge) is no longer demanded by the audience, but fraudulently subverted. We, the audience, want to be entertained in the »Rössl« and are willing to let ourselves into all possible illusions that the staging offers us, sometimes grandiose, sometimes transparent. So it doesn’t matter whether the Rössl hits like “What can Sigismund do for being so beautiful” by a hundred-member orchestra or a seven-part band (which, by the way, are wonderfully soft and pearly, almost to smoothly played).
But the director and some actors on the stage no longer trust this contract. Like hard-hearted puppeteers, they repeatedly withdraw the play from us and bring us back down to earth. The role of head waiter Leopold Brandmeyer, for example, which Christian Grygas gives us, becomes more and more holey in the course of the play – the illusion frays. He doesn’t seem to know exactly why he’s called the “boss” [sic] actually coveted: brashly he courted the landlady, moaned about a lack of love on her part, at some point made himself a monkey as a purple tartlet in “Austria-O-Mat” and at the end kisses his adored Josepha without real passion. Does he already dread his future life as a girl for everything in a fucked up Berlin train station bar?
“You have to take that first, otherwise it will double up. […] exactly as it says there. ”(Otto Sander).
“If I want to chalk something up or uncover or break something with it, then I won’t do this piece.” (Ursli Pfister)
As beautiful as this room by René Fußhöller and Antonia Kamp was put on the revolving stage as an idea (shocked sighs from the audience when the curtain was opened for the first time!), The transmission of a hotel during the high season, at whose pier the wealthy and willing to have fun, cracks and creaks Customers are washed up with every newly arriving steamer, into a yawning empty urban neighborhood scene with all its sad night characters. It is difficult to explain why guests dressed in the finest silk suits suddenly turn up in this tired establishment, why tablecloths are on the tables, the food is served under globes and a porter brings the suitcases to the room. Why are lovers in heat (Ella Rombouts, in the second premiere: Paul Kmetsch) miming the two putti of the Sistine Madonna incoherently (twice in a row if the audience did not immediately decipher the image)? Leadership and text direction also throw you out of Coleridge’s illusionary contract: why do father (Markus Liske) and daughter (Christina Maria Fercher) sit at different tables, and why is the wonderful libretto by Charell and Benatzky so awkwardly modernized in some places ? In the end, does the director no longer trust the play to be relevant for us today?
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