Crash landing on the planet Shakespeare

threat from space? Interstellar rendezvous? In Stanislaw Lem’s science fiction novel The Voice of the Lord, a “pulsing beam of neutrinos” hits the earth. A group of scientists – top secret, of course – set about deciphering the alien signs, the “star letter”. What is he trying to tell us?

The experimental setup at the Maxim Gorki Theater looks very similar. The author collective Soeren Voima wants to take on a text written by a galactic named William Shakespeare. English people. Actor. That’s what they say. Others believe that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of a nobleman – theater was considered dishonorable back then, around 1600.

Queen Elizabeth I may also have been behind it. These royals are capable of anything. Elizabeth II, just 70 years on the throne, finally provided the material for a very successful series with her family, “The Crown”.

Here King Lear is a queen. No problem with the already complicated family relationships. And Queen Lear now has two sons and a daughter instead of three daughters. Count Gloucester and his son are also female after a dramaturgical gender change. It all happened before.

Off to space with the Queen

Maybe new: “Queen Lear” takes place in space, on spaceships. The Civil War of the Lear Heirs as Star War. With lightsaber. And live music, like in the silent films, when the actors put their speech into facial expressions and gestures. Christian Weise’s direction is laid on thick throughout, full charge, coarse and loud. Almost three and a half hours.

It starts with a promise. With the announcement that it could be ugly and brutal. After that there are a few backstage jokes and cinema. A large screen hangs over the stage, behind it the set of moving parts, the structure and the animations by Julia Oschatz are probably deliberately shaky and transparent, which has its charm for a while: if you look at the shrill colors and wigs of the star warriors designed by Paula Wellmann The fluffed-up room gap, in which Corinna Harfouch is initially hardly recognizable, is funny.

Garish and loud like the get-up, that’s the tone on board these Learjets. The evil, mean, devious as a harmless caricature – most pronounced in Lear’s sons Goneril (Tim Freudensprung) and Regan (Emre Aksizoglu), surpassed by the sleazy Edmund (Aram Tafreshian). You can’t take anyone seriously, nothing. The Queen’s clown (Oscar Olivo) is surprisingly quiet. Svenja Liesau, actually Edgar and one of the good guys, takes on the funny, philosophical job. With a Berlin snout she babbles merrily and cunningly about Fragmichmal and has her own repertoire of jokes (Pullermann and Pillermann).

Jokes with Pillermann and Pullermann

Better not to ask what that has to do with King or Queen Lear or Queen Queer. And because of Pullermann: What will the change bring? Soeren Voima make Shakespeare gender-fair? Not really. That sons are worse daughters – the thesis fails because of the universal badness in Shakespeare’s universe. And that women are smarter – this is countered by Queen Lear’s decision to divide up the empire as she divides it. To the wrong ones.

The text variants bring no new knowledge. Rather, one has the impression that the play has shrunk to the size of a travesty, to the point of silliness.

So it will be difficult for Corinna Harfouch. Little by little she slips out of her space cage costume and stands alone in her unadorned sack dress. A wretched creature. The old white man – if you want to use the fighting terminology – has become a white woman.

And now? Once upon a time, at the Volksbühne with Frank Castorf, she admirably played the male lead in Des Teufels General. Perhaps one also thinks of Marianne Hoppe, who made Robert Wilson a Lear. There was hardness, sharpness in it, and no one asked what it was supposed to be.

The queen wanders around the Maxim Gorki Theater, degraded by her descendants, but also by the staging, which is never finished. Afterwards they then go out onto the wet and cold street, to the tram stop, followed by the camera team, who transfer the erratic scenes inside.

final battle on earth

Ah, and another idea, another gag, and so on. The final battle takes place on Earth, with lots of stage fog. Filmed from above while the ensemble can be seen rolling on the floor through the slot below the screen. Before that, however, there are excursions into the traditional subject – when Countess Gloucester (Catherine Stoyan) seeks death with bloody eye sockets and does not find it.

It’s a König Leer, a lesson in some things the theater often fails to do. No clear way of playing, only playground. When in doubt, the over-the-top, parodic shows through. The text does not create any new spaces, wants to be political in some way, is helpless in the face of Shakespeare. The bravery is what is really disturbing. Are you making fun of gender talk, want to bring some humor to the starlet story? Why this editing at all?

Shortly before the premiere, Fabian Hagen stepped in for Lindy Larsson. He plays Kent, from the Queen’s camp, brings another clown. At the very end he seems to startle, speaks thoughtfully, without attitude. As if he were finally in the real movie. A good but very brief moment. “The hardest lot was given to the eldest, we disciples will never experience so much,” says the old translation by Ludwig Tieck. well