Graf Öderland

Stefan Bachmann has now turned prosecutor Martin’s rampage into an enthralling piece of theatre of images, where all the play’s riddles and fragments find their natural place in a nightmarish dramaturgy. While Frisch still took a petit bourgeois milieu as his starting point and outlined settings including a prison cell and a governmental palace, Bachmann’s narrowing of dream, reality and subconscious is given a stage that is as abstract as it is expressive. In Olaf Altmann’s gigantic vertical funnel, the characters are trying in vain to find a foothold and crash again and again. This also goes for prosecutor Martin, played by Thiemo Strutzenberger as an annoyingly cheerful murderer-saint who will destroy everything that gets in the way of his infantile crusade for self-realisation – be it the institution of marriage, the law or morality. He becomes both the myth of “Count Oederland wielding an axe” and the leader of an illustrious freedom movement. Finally, however, he realises that this makes him all the more qualified for the very system driven by functionality and efficiency that he had tried to escape.

How splendidly this parable from the 1950s suits our present times, where countries are ruled by Borderline-patients and confused conspiracy-windbags have chosen “freedom” as their battle-cry (which, admittedly, had not yet happened at the time of the premiere) is pretty much self-explanatory in this production, which harvests its images and distorted physiognomies chiefly from the history of film. Between expressionist silent-film-quotes à la Nosferatu, Tim Burton’s spookiness and Tarantino’s splatter, the show finds its own language for the monstrous that is only concealed by the thin varnish of civilisation. Thanks to its splendid live music and increasingly ballad-like spoken song, this precisely choreographed production develops a strong maelstrom and shows how quickly alienation and a weariness of civil society can shift into aggression. Not only at the fringes of society but also at its centre.