Dying young turns out to be beneficial not only to skywalkers like Buddy Holly, Sam Cooke or Jesus. Even in a surely rather elitist world like that of German theatre, you can achieve star status through an early death. That's every Christoph Schlingensief happened to the man who died of lung cancer in 2010. The man had already antagonised just about everyone imaginable throughout the German-speaking world. Always on the edge of what was still acceptable, he also antagonised the traditional Left Church (called "Gutmenschen" in Germany) with performances in which the audience could vote in a kind of asylum-seeker Big Brother on deporting refugees or in which a few recovered neo-Nazis starred in a Hamlet.
Mea Culpa was his penultimate performance (see elsewhere on this site also the review of his swan song Via Intolleranza) and is best seen as this director's last attempt to make sense of everything in his life. And we should take all that a little literally. In a nearly three-hour orgy of images, music and text, he wipes the floor with church, opera, art, development aid and himself. At first, this seems like overkill, but even in that overkill, the performance has a deep 'soul' that is palpable amidst all the megalomaniacal turntables, orchestras and masses of actors.
Dying is terrible, especially for someone as young and full of ideals as Schlingensief, who had just turned 40. In this play, his role is now played by another actor, but in everything you sense that the spirit of the inspired director haunts the wings. This is an aspect that becomes increasingly palpable towards the end, which makes the final performance, with its inescapable farewell, guttural. So grand, so extreme, and so oppressive you rarely see theatre.
Seen: 2 June as the opening of the Holland Festival
Related articles
- Her Majesty Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands Attends the 64th Annual Holland Festival (royalcorrespondent.com)
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
Comments are closed.