2023-11-04 23:48:00
“Comedy by Georg Büchner, Rebekka David & Ensemble” is what the announcement says. However, there is not much left of Büchner’s “Leonce and Lena” in the adaptation at the Graz Schauspielhaus. The new version “Leonce & Lena – nowhere to run” premiered on the main stage on Friday evening. The applause after almost two hours was fairly friendly – not least for the strong ensemble performance. The production, however, rumbles a bit at times; The fragments of the original text do not turn out to be a particularly suitable basis for the narrative that director David is concerned with: the melancholic romance about the royal children of the empires Popo and Pipi, who are to be married to each other against their will and only meet while fleeing from each other fall in love with each other, this is a treatise on the questionability of a system in which work is fetishized and every self-worth is linked to material wealth, while an exploited world has long been heading towards ruin.
Unwilling heirs
Of course, rewritings are an effective means of loading canonical texts with contemporary questions. This access opens up here because Büchner’s comedy is also designed as a political satire: the author criticized the idleness and ignorance of a narrow-minded nobility. David is now building a socio-political pamphlet around a central generational conflict of the present. The boys no longer want to work, Leonce and Lena (capricious: Dominik Puhl and Otiti Engelhardt) are unwilling heirs to an entrepreneurship that ruthlessly aims to “create something” and “have it better” without ever considering the meaningfulness of its existence Do ask. And that raises its children to have a career in a sick world.
Some are idle, others toil: Otiti Engelhardt, Annette Holzmann © lex-karelly
But the next generation has no interest in it: When Leonce finds out that he is supposed to take over his father’s (Rudi Widerhofer) company, he briefly retreats behind the scenes to scream his frustration at the top of his lungs. And right at the beginning, in direct dialogue with the audience, the actors don’t even seem sure whether they want to spend the evening on stage. A nice gag at the start of a production that embellishes its scenes with amusing artificiality, but is consistently staged without Büchner’s juicy puns and humor.
“Dolce far niente” guaranteed
The director allows her ensemble a bit of slapstick, whose protagonists, wrapped in pink tulle between blood-red palace walls and upside-down trees (stage: Robin Metzer, costumes: Anna Maria Schories), refuse to take on any responsibility, while the exhausted father struggles with the fact that his son doesn’t wants to accept what he wants to “so selflessly put in his lap” and the domestics (Annette Holzmann, Mario Lopatta) work like animals. In the end, Leonce’s servant Valerio will have a power of attorney issued that guarantees the rich kids and their predecessors the continuation of their “Dolce far niente” – but in his inaugural speech the face of the radical can already be seen behind the fresh, cheerful phrases. Note: Idleness is really the beginning of all vices. Because anyone who withdraws from the conflicts of the present leaves their place in society to the populists and extremists. The revolutionary Büchner might have liked this idea.
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