IPHEGENIA AUF TAURIS at the MAXIM GORKY THEATER, UNTER DEN LINDEN, BERLIN, 12TH OKTOBER, 2012

IPHEGENIA AUF TAURIS by J.W von GOETHE at the MAXIM GORKY THEATER, UNTER DEN LINDEN, BERLIN, 12TH OKTOBER, 2012

Spieldauer: 1:45h Besetzungsliste Franziska Walser / Edgar Selge Ein Abend von Peter Baur / Sibylle Dudek / Falko Herold / Edgar Selge / Franziska Walser, Bühne, Kostüme und Video Peter Baur / Falko Herold, Dramaturgie Sibylle Dudek Koproduktion mit den Ruhrfestspielen Recklinghausen Mit freundlicher Unterstützung der Ernsting Stiftung Alter Hof Herding Berliner Premiere am 10. Dezember 2011 im Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin 

I went to see Iphegenia auf Tauris by Goethe in Berlin on Friday evening. It was a wet October evening in Berlin but still quite mild. I walked past the Tiergarten, straight ahead, past the Berliner Philharmonie and past the Sony Centre, making the mistake of getting on the S-Bahn at Potsdamer Platz since it was then so wet and miserable. The station Unter den Linden seemed to have been shut down so I got off at a new station, Brandenburger Tor. Then I was on Unter den Linden, the most famous boulevard in Germany. After walking for 10 minutes I found the Maxim Gorki Theater beside the Humboldt University and went in to pick up my press reservation. 

What an evening it was! The play Iphegenia auf Tauris is adapted from an orginal play by the Greek playwright Euripedes but the story itself is of far older origin and concerns the fate of Ephigeneia sister of Orestes who has been exiled to the island of Tauris in the Black Sea and longs to return to the mainland. The point is that the story has already been told and is outlined anyway on black chalkboards that surround the auditorium. These are stark, sophisticated, yet primitive works that are not only essential to knowing the story of the sack of Troy, King Agamemnon's homecoming and murder by his wife Clytemnestra and the subsequent saga of retribution and guilt, but in establishing the play's style. The amazing chalk sketches are completed in black, white and red and tell us that the play is not about the events which are already, not only known, but legendary. They run like a continuous narrative in the manner of the Bayeux Tapestry and are like a Brechtian device of alienation or distanciation. They imply that the play is about the relationship between Iphegenia and the four men, Thoas King of the Tauri, Orestes, Pylades and Arkas in the play who help her to find a voice. The actors wear contemporary clothes that are grey, functional, anonymous, starkly simple or even neo-classical and thus a reduced yet powerful pallette is evoked. The play is also minimalistic with four male characters being portrayed by one actor and a minimal yet powerful mise en scene. A camera above the stage allows the cast to mark up stage timings on a board which resembles a wheeled surgical or morgue stretcher. They also draw scenes from the play supplemented by straw puppets representing the absent characters. 

The original play was drafted in prose, then re-drafted and finally written in verse and the actors, Franziska Walser, daughter of the famous German novelist Martin Walser, who depicts Iphegenia and Edgar Selge, a star of the small screen in Germany, who is Orestes/Pylades/Thoas/Arkas, seem to want the play to be intimate, prosaic, personal and devoid of its grandiose theatrical and poetic origins. Its as if the production aims at sucking all the perhaps ludicrously pompous material out in order to present this starkly modern version of Goethe as if he was our contemporary. This play is worth seeing if the viewer has the patience to work with the text not as a part of a heroic saga but as the depiction of a personal evolution against a tragic backdrop. The play is sufficiently revised to make it intimate and to make Goethe and his era both relevant and necessary to our own. 

Paul Murphy, Berlin, October 2012

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