 
Heinrich Spängler
Helga Rabl-Stadler
Entführung
Masterpiece
Don Carlo
Woyzeck
The concerts
|
PICTORIAL WORLD OF EMOTIONAL ADVENTURES
Michael Thalheimer stages Georg Büchner’s "Woyzeck"
Thalheimer’s approach appears to be radical, even violent. He does not deny that he intends to irritate his audience. The characters in his concise, tremendously intensive productions are in a constant state of high tension and as a consequence the public is often outraged. Anyone who, like Michael Thalheimer, so rigorously investigates emotions, longings and painful losses from today’s perspective, must touch a nerve of our time. He moves in dramatic literature as if he were in a gigantic quarry, the beauties of which he intends to re-sculpt for us but with the stylistic means of pop culture.
Understanding theatre via the senses
However, Thalheimer’s search is concerned with the inner mystery of a drama. He opens up the core of the work with great intensity and tries to make it an emotional experience. “I would like to understand theatre more via the senses than through reason”, he says. He intends his productions to convey a feeling for life “like good songs”. His actors and actresses follow him unconditionally into the wild and risky pictorial world of his emotional adventures. As Fritzi Hoberlandt says, his touching Julie in Molnar’s Liliom and Luise in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, they accompany him along his “stony, but incredibly exciting path”.
Comprssed to the essence
Thalheimer does not see himself as a destroyer of plays but his intention is rather to compress things to the essence. He calls it “boiling down”, thereby describing the evaporation point of his productions which reduce the text of classical dramas lasting several hours to eighty or ninety minutes. Thalheimer’s stagings are never boring. They are permeated with the red-hot glow of people’s desperate longing, who move as if they are in a dance theatre, but paradoxically in their terrifying loneliness they are also icy cold. One critic described him as “apocalyptic with a sense of comedy”.
Rudolf Hradil, Salzburg,
River Salzach, 19
Waterfalls of language
Of course the beauty of the classical language remains, though only in
traces. Waterfalls of language and abrupt, faltering, stammered sentences,
long pauses and hectic dialogues appear to turn a person inside out and
relate – occasionally also with grotesque comedy – the discrepancy
between speaking and feeling, and the inability to put what
is unfathomable into words. It was only a question of time before Thalheimer
would turn to Büchner’s Woyzeck, this magnificent fragment
of a human catastrophe in a world sensed as being deeply under threat.
Vulnerable characters
Thalheimer is in his mid-thirties and following on from the series of
his productions over the last two years in Leipzig, Hamburg and Berlin,
which catapulted him to the giddy heights of the most highly regarded
and highly awarded German stage-directors, it seems to be an obvious step
for him to stage Woyzeck at the Salzburg Festival: from Büchner’s
Leonce und Lena, characterised by eccentric wit,
to the sensational performances of Liliom, Emilia Galotti,
and Kabale und Liebe which were concentrated totally on fatal inter-human
misdemeanours, the path leads directly
to this pitiful creature which is at the mercy of inscrutable
forces. Michael Thalheimer says “I want to show vulnerable characters
on stage. In real life they are seen so rarely.”
Karin Kathrein
Rudolf Hradil, Salzburg
with the University Church, 1992
Georg Büchner
Woyzeck
New production
Stage director Michael Thalheimer
Stage and lighting design Olaf Altmann
Costumes Michael Barth
Music Bert Wrede
Dramaturgy Juliane Koepp
Woyzeck Peter Moltzen
Marie Fritzi Haberlandt
Hauptmann Norman Hacker
Doktor Peter Jordan
Tambourmajor Peter Kurth
Andres Katahrina Schmalenberg
Die Rampensau Markus Graf
Margret/Käthe N.N.
Mann N.N.
Landestheater
Premiere
Saturday 16 August 7.30 p.m.
Further performances
Sunday 17 August 7.30 p.m.
Tuesday 19 August 7.30 p.m.
Wednesday 20 August 7.30 p.m.
Thursday 21 August 7.30 p.m.
Friday 22 August 7.30 p.m.
Saturday 23 August 7.30 p.m.
Sunday 24 August 7.30 p.m.
Monday 25 August 7.30 p.m.
Tuesday 26 August 7.30 p.m.
Tickets are available from the Ticket Office
of the Salzburg Festival for the performances on 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22,
23, 24, 25 and 26 August in the following price categories:
€ 15 / 25 / 40 / 50 / 75 / 95 / 120
Telephone: 0043 662 8045-500
Telefax: 0043 662 8045-555
E-mail: info@salzburgfestival.at