Fleeing to Paradise

Fleeing to Paradise (“Auf der Flucht ins Paradies”)

Scenes of Couples in the Work of Georg Büchner

6–11 February 1997

Students on the acting course at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin, directed by Dieter Bitterli.

Three plays that could hardly be more different. The first is a revolutionary drama, a play of political discourse and sinister demagoguery. The second was written for a comedy competition, a parody of the conventional comedy formula, behind whose mask lies bitter criticism of political and social conditions. The third, finally, is unfinished: a fragment, a tragedy, as its first editor called it. Büchner’s dramatic work is disparate, and yet certain themes recur and similar constellations of characters appear.

To help his students, Dieter Bitterli gave each set of scenes a different framework, matching the distinctive character of each play with a different spatial solution. The design was by Franziska Just. Leonce and Lena meet in the arena of a grand bourgeois salon. Their love blossoms by the fireside, in the midst of the audience, who sit in a circle on red upholstered chairs. They are variety artists pulled by invisible strings, travelling players who blow into the room for a moment and, once their performance is over, move on again.

Woyzeck is quite different. Reduced to the story of a woman between two men, it is presented as a psychological chamber play in the balcony room of the Löwenpalais. The audience remain outside, following the scenes from the corridor. The rest of the world is shut out of the action too: the windows are hung with heavy military coats. The togetherness of the couples in Danton, by contrast, is lived out in front of the whole world. In the gallery rooms of the villa, surrounded by an audience that catches every movement at close quarters, they live through doubts and fears, and the guillotine always threatens as a shadow on the wall. In times of revolution, private moments are rare, and yet they are vehemently asserted in full public view.

In the scenes from Danton’s Death, the concept of the project emerges most clearly. The eye is drawn away from the actual events to something else: the main protagonist, politics, gives way to individual destinies. The characters’ feelings are tied to places, which the audience literally walks through on its journey through the performance spaces. The walk through the Löwenpalais is like a walk through Büchner’s work.

Yet the participants did not trust Büchner’s language entirely. Songs often interrupt the action and express feelings where the characters fall silent. This does not always succeed, but here Büchner is thought through to the end in a radical way: he himself worked fragments of folk songs into his dramas. Together with Katarina Rasinski, the students plundered this stock still further and established singing as a theatrical device in its own right. And it is precisely the abundance of means, the skilful staging of the spaces and, not least, the students’ largely successful approach to the difficult roles that make the project a rewarding encounter with the poet Georg Büchner.

Quotation (A/257–264): Danton: I love you like the grave. Julie: Oh! Danton: No, listen! People say that in the grave there is peace, and that grave and peace are one. If that is so, then in your lap I already lie beneath the earth. You sweet grave, your lips are funeral bells, your voice is my death-knell, your breast my burial mound and your heart my coffin. Music/singing