Photos: Burgtheater / Matthias Horn
VIENNA / Burgtheater:
DANTON’S DEATH by Georg Büchner (?)
Premiere: December 16, 2023
When the CanCan from “Orpheus in the Underworld” sounds at the beginning of the evening, you think you are in the wrong piece – and there you are. In fact, what the Burgtheater offers under the title “Danton’s Death” is pure label fraud. Now director has Johan Simons For example, two years ago with Horvath’s “Wiener Wald” he showed absolute lack of instinct, but the work was almost played, while with Büchner he moved so far away from the original that nothing of it can be recognized anymore.
Why should anyone really bother putting on stage a historical drama written by a young genius? (There may be cuts, but with feeling!) It is a play in which the fatigue of the revolution is traced, the dramatic development of the central characters is followed in a final bloodlust, where razor-sharp dialogue provides political analysis and a dramatic courtroom scene Large theatre? No, you have nothing to do with Büchner.
Johan Simons has reduced the play’s large cast to the most important protagonists (Thomas Payne, however, found no mercy in his eyes) and made use of chunks of the text. He also places the action in a circus arena, and the clowns are cavorting around there – as if what was happening was funny.
But wait, nothing actually happens. If you didn’t recognize Ofczarek and Maertens under their stupid make-up masks, you wouldn’t even know who they are, let alone the others. There is no plot and no characters that make sense here, there are one or two Büchner texts taken out of context. But it’s not brought to the point, but rather delivered somehow. “Danton’s Death”? Nebbich.
Johan Simons was “a master”, had Nicholas Ofczarek announced in an interview. Does he really and honestly believe that he played Danton in this mixture of convict and Beckett clown that he appears on stage as?
And Michael Maertens, with slanted eyebrows made up to look like a sad clown? This poor, insecure figure is supposed to be Robespierre, the man who sent thousands upon thousands to the slaughter? And Jan Bülowwho delivers what little was left to him by the slavering bloodhound St. Just in an uninterested manner, as if casually?
With the ecxeption of Ole Lagerpusch, who is not at all the prompter that Büchner created, but at least got to speak other people’s texts (for example by Camille in the original piece) and repeatedly becomes something of a emcee, no one comes into his own. There are just a few of them left as decorations – Felix Rechwhich is allowed to play so little of Camille Desmoulins, Johannes Zirner and Maximilian Pulst, fidgeting, tripping circus characters. The three ladies (Annamária Láng, Marie-Luise Stockinger, Andrea Wenzl), functionless as they are here, they could pack up anyway, they don’t play along. They are victims of a direction that was unable to convey what it wanted – and leaves the audience open to the question of what should interest them in this “interpretation”…
The final applause is always guaranteed in the Burgtheater, and no one offered the director the slightest resistance. Which just means that actors and audiences get what they deserve.
Renate Wagner
2023-12-17 00:40:46
#VIENNA #Burgtheater #DANTONS #DEATH #Online #marker
