Handke at the Cologne Theater: Ready for farewell

Every beginning is difficult. Especially when you are learning a, or more precisely, your first language, mistakes and distortions are to be expected. Curious nonsense sentences like “But the chair is disgusting because it’s not a table” or “The broom is a word that you can apply to a shoelace” – can happen! However, the more you grow up, the more logic and order emerge.

The child becomes an adult. This is what Peter Handke's play “Kaspar” from 1967 tells about, which was just re-performed at the Cologne Theater. First of all, a tranquil topic. Because it doesn't stay all that nice either in the text or on stage. Language, the message goes, not only leads to autonomy, it not only helps us lose fear of the things we were previously unable to name. Rather, it also leads to adaptation, sometimes to the blind adoption of half-knowledge and fakes.

Before the events on stage change - so much has already been spoiled - things in Claudia Bauer's production are actually humorous and lively. Loosely tied to the story of Kaspar Hauser, a boy who arrived in Nuremberg in 1828 and had no communication skills due to his previous isolation, a Kasparin looks back on the past.

She arranges a birthday cake on a video projection and for the next two hours follows the goings-on on stage mostly on the television. There, the ensemble (including Rebekka Biener, Elias Eilinghoff, Andreas Grötzinger) recreates the symbolic birth at the beginning. As if its members were fighting their way out of a vulva, they pushed aside the rear stage wall made of brown cardboard boxes. As soon as the clownish, blue-costumed figures have mastered this, the red curtain falls. The statement: From now on everything is theater, and not just metaphorically, life itself turns out to be a theatrum mundi.

This requires the right text. Sometimes it's difficult for it to come out of the mouth, sometimes gibberish pours out from the actors. The telephone booths on the left are helpful. When the doorbell rings, someone picks up the phone and speaks the sentences into a cable microphone. The funny telephone theater is accompanied by plenty of slapstick. The appearance of a player as a gigantic furry creature seems particularly funny. But at some point the colorful circus show ends. The twists and turns take on a strangely threatening character. “War is indeed a misfortune, but sometimes it is unavoidable,” we learn, or “The stranger is different”; “The criminal is scum.”

To illustrate the indoctrination of these dangerous phrases, the ensemble comes together in a school class. One person declaims, the others complement, and at the very front the conductor sets the rhythm. This farce comes to a dramatic head with the staccato of a piano. The violence that is gradually building up and being discharged is best carried out by the phenomenal live musicians Arpen Daks and Elisabeth Coudoux. They control the quiet moments as well as the very loud ones. The latter includes, for example, a scene in which the group beats one of their own in a closet with baseball bats. A little later she staggers out covered in blood and, cynically accompanied by percussion, shoots around with a rifle.

Sounds like a comic? In the often bright light, this association quickly becomes obvious. The funky presentation marks an ironic fall between situational comedy and the emergence of fascist structures. Yes, even if the characters profess to be polite and self-determined, they seem to be controlled by others, guided by a language that normalizes aggression and exclusion. When, towards the end, a woman pushes everyone else out with a fly swatter and the actors then saw up photo displays of their group members, there is nothing behind it other than unloading hatred.

This topicality is certainly already present in Handke's work, which, like all his plays, dispenses with psychology and plot and is more like a stage poem. Claudia Bauer masters the challenge of realizing the monotony of the sentence-by-sentence aesthetic in an entertaining and visually rich manner excellently. She drives the ensemble almost breathlessly, which is allowed to indulge in complete decadence. The background opens up and a living cube with a Klingerstein look is pushed forward. As it spins, the players inside celebrate. They masturbate or satisfy each other orally.

“But no one gets beaten up without a reason,” it says in one of the many snippets of conversation. If you realize that Handke wrote these phrases on the eve of the 1968 revolt and still had the unresolved Nazi era in mind, they seem oppressive. The abyss is huge, all in the midst of this wonderfully over-the-top intoxication.