Castorf premiere in the Berliner Ensemble: The Abyss glows for six and a half hours

A greenish tiled back wall of the stage with a urinal, a sink and a shower. At the front there is a historic theater bar, a wood-panelled salon back wall and bar stools. Juliette Martens, Hendrik Höfgen's “Black Venus” (Annabelle Lengronne), sits quietly on one of them. Max Gindorff enters the stage and begins to speak. It quickly becomes clear: It is Klaus Mann himself who is reporting here, who tells the story in tense, concise sentences and thus anticipates what is to come: Frank Castorf's “Mephistopheles” goes beyond the original novel.

Mann describes the rise and moral fall of his friend, the actor and later artistic director Gustaf Gründgens, named in his novel as Hendrik Höfgen, who, initially silent and played by Jens Harzer, steps forward. And he also describes how, after the fall of the National Socialists in the year after the end of the war in 1946, he was back on stage and sitting in the audience. From here the first dialogues emerge. But first dance follows. From now on, small physically ecstatic sequences will permeate the evening, as will Roman Ott's saxophone, in his dual role as Prime Minister or Hermann Göring and theater director Schmitz.

“Currency is the most terrible and boring thing in the theater,” said the former Volksbühne director Castorf in the newspaper Die Welt in August on the occasion of his 75th birthday. It is the history of the characters that would interest the director, but without drawing analogies to the present, and in fact this “Mephistopheles” is stuck in the temporality inscribed in it.

Although the contemporary flashes from time to time in the often typical camera transmission or some self-referential moments, such as the director's own appearance in one of the video sequences, this always happens when the actors reveal their game: they play themselves, their roles in the play, in the novel, in the story and often, as in the case of Sebastian Zimmler as the ardent Nazi Hans Miklas and the convinced communist Otto Ulrichs, in double Cast. As a viewer, you can get confused at first.

In contrast to Jette Steckel's neatly told "Mephisto", which, coming from the Munich Kammerspiele, was only a guest at the Berliner Theatertreffen in May of this year, there is little linearity here, it goes haywire formally, and yet in the resulting pull of the desire to understand, tightly woven psychological threads emerge that hold the characters together.

It's about gay desire, sadism, fetish and exoticism, about opportunism and convictions, about excess, about the (hate) love of theater and about the bigger, even the repulsive, connections. Opulence and abyss in the stage design (Castorf confidant Aleksandar Denić) - from the pee pool to the revue stage with the letters "I'm just an actor" emblazoned above it (an allusion to the last sentence in the novel) - and costume (Adriana Braga Peretzki) underline the frantic play.

Jens Harzer as Gründgens/Höfgen/Mephisto/Faust embodies this seemingly casually with smeared back hair and a partly shrugging, partly moaning intonation. And the monologues of the Frenchwoman Lengronne as the dominant lover, which are conveyed to the audience through surtitles, captivate the audience in an almost torturous manner, in keeping with the role.

It is precisely in these moments that Castorf ultimately succeeds - perhaps even unintentionally - in making the recipients ponder on the topic, as they confront the viewer too much with their own gaze. The fact that the whole thing works without the pointer of morality satisfies the mind so much that it even forgives the sometimes trite jokes. Perhaps it is they who carry the audience throughout the six and a half hour evening. There is only one break. You shouldn't use it for walking - you might regret it.