Fegefeuer in Ingolstadt (Purgatory in Ingolstadt)

Theatre on full playback. Sounds ghastly. And it is. But not in an aesthetic sense of the word. Susanne Kennedy’s production is at the height of scary art. Most ghastly of all is the way she portrays the deformation of souls. Kennedy places Fleißer’s characters in an oppressively tight space, flickering with stark neon lights, and then projects this space back onto itself. The walls begin to tremble and the room takes on a life of its own. Fleißer’s purgatory as a feverish dream, where people mutate into zombies. Their jumpers are too tight, their dresses too skimpy and their trousers too short. Their faces seem to be made of wax. Their language has come away from their cramped bodies. It takes the audience a while to catch on: All the dialogue has been recorded, recited in an affected tone, and the actors are lip-synching. The production comes across as an unsettling installation. Who would have thought that Marieluise Fleißer’s classic work of critical folk theatre could still be so perturbing today?

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