Three innovative shows from this year’s edition of the German festival – Five Deleted Messages, Endlose Aussicht and The Opera #2 – On the Ropes (About the End) – epitomise artistic director Rolf C Hemke’s desire to reflect on political turbulence worldwide and push Weimar’s cultural taste in daring directions
While Rolf C Hemke’s second year as artistic director of Weimar’s Kunstfest in Germany has not gone as originally planned, Covid-19 has not prevented his quest for the city to embrace experimental art forms nor disrupted his commitment to reflect on political turbulence taking place worldwide. Hemke also decided to widen the festival’s thematic concerns to include the pandemic, Thuringia and the environment.
In Alte Feuerwache, a cinema drive-in, Falk Richter’s existentialist Five Deleted Messages (★★★) is a raging monologue set during the lockdown. Complemented by Chris Kondek’s “found-footage” video, Dimitrij Schaad is an unlikeable K who responds to the Covid crisis with Kafka-esque helplessness and then absurdist Faustian enquiry. Though it is possible to see where the play is going from its first words, its ambivalent ending is still an abyss-like blow to the stomach.
Also in Alte Feuerwache, playwright Theresia Walser’s Endlose Aussicht (★★★★), set on a cruise liner, is a witty exploration of Western greed. Judith Rosmair as Jona, who is trapped in her cabin by a curfew, strides manically about the stage snapping out sharp observations of her fellow passengers. The audience rolls about laughing, though the atmosphere changes when the uneven relationship between Covid and class is exposed through a comic parody of the film Titanic.
Walser also re-examines Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own – it no longer symbolises freedom from the tyranny of patriarchy, but has become a prison and a torment from which Jona can’t escape. Walser is well known for her grotesque comedic writing and this does not disappoint.
Novoflot’s The Opera #2 – On the Ropes (About the End) (★★★★), exposing a dazzling array of talent, is the second in a three-part cycle that gives the genre a reboot and explores Claudio Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea. It begins with a political speech extolling socialist virtues spoken in clipped English and feels like a bit of a poke at the current British government’s depreciating values. Then bedlam breaks out as the orchestra is interrupted by a DJ scratching on his decks, a saxophonist comically speaking down his mouthpiece and a guitarist plucking his chords as if he were Nigel Kennedy playing the Doors concerto. Eventually, a kind of harmony is restored, albeit slightly atonally.
In a time when the growing influence of the AfD and the far right in Germany is causing concern and populist governments are encouraging division, Novoflot’s ingenious opera is a gentle if simple reminder of how different cultures and epochs can achieve harmony. And no show better epitomises Hemke’s desire to push Weimar’s cultural taste away from the past and in more daring directions than On the Ropes (About the End).
This was article first published in The Stage
