Amphitryon und sein Doppelgänger

Who would risk establishing an I these days? In the era of multiple selves, director Karin Henkel demonstrates how Kleist’s material can be treated today: As a game of layers, like those of an onion, but at the end there is – not the core, but the capitulation: “Oh!” A two-storied stage, endless loops of text, the audience held prisoner to the idea of presenting identity as a maze. Everybody could just as well be someone else, and all this is accomplished with a precise rhythm, Kleist’s blank verse performed with great lightness. Karin Henkel narrates the remake of a remake, the doubling of a doppelganger story. Who is who? In the end, not even the king of gods can tell anymore. The actors can make no sense of themselves or the world. “I am”, says modern man, says Amphitryon, “crazy myself.” The director works with irresistible visual humour in the style of the film noir, with simultaneously performed scenes, rapid role changes, all revealing Kleist’s universe to be a world full of paradoxes, fears and tragic conflict.

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