Zwiegespräch

One morning at a nursing home: Some elderly residents prepare for the day while young female carers look after them. Discarded, useless and subjected to the hard-boiled nursing staff, the old people reflect on grandfathers and grandfatherdom per se. They think about ageing, dying, the fear of disappearing and the loss of their own position in a world where there seem to be only two ways out: retreat into memories or death. But they also consider what it means to play – with their grandchildren, with truth(s), with other people. What makes up a narrative, how can we examine our own story, what part of our ancestors do we carry with us?
Director Rieke Süßkow’s staging is impressively confident in its form. It finds a clear situatedness for Peter Handke’s associative text from 2022 which eschews location, characters and plotline. Set, costumes, music and choreography mesh coherently while the actors show their virtuoso skills in giving resonance to Handke’s artful language as well as the need for storytelling that is inherent in the text.

Statement of the Jury
Peter Handke’s “Zwiegespräch” largely dispenses with plot or characters; instead, it revolves around the phenomenon of narration itself. Director Rieke Süßkow prises the speech acts wide open: On the one hand, she distributes the text between Burgtheater-grandees Hans Dieter Knebel, Branko Samarovski and Martin Schwab, who appear as the pitiful residents of a retirement home. On the other hand, the young actors Maresi Riegner and Elisa Plüss get their chance as merciless care workers. Two generations confront each other and the imbalance of power between residents and nursing staff is vividly evident: Let the old white men chatter as much as they like – they do not have a say (any longer).
The generational conflict may not have been set up in Handke’s material, but it makes a lot of theatrical sense: With this nightmarish old people’s home and its heartless routine in dealing with death and dying, the director sets a strong visual positing next to, underneath and above the text material without damaging it in the process. Süßkow sharpens and escalates. Her “Zwiegespräch” at the Akademietheater succeeds as a ghoulishly beautiful dance of death.

Tojuror Valeria Heintges’ video statement in the Berliner Festspiele Media (in German)

ProgrammeBooklet (pdf, 1.7 MB)