Theater Christoph Marthaler's wicked grotesque of hopelessness

Christoph Marthaler opened the 2024/2025 Basel theater season on Friday with an absurdly funny grotesque about the descent of disoriented people into the maw of the extreme right. The premiere audience celebrated the production with frenetic applause.

As is so often the case with the internationally acclaimed playwright Marthaler, it begins on the stage of the Basel Schauspielhaus with scenes of a society of deeply lost human souls that are difficult to understand. Is it the family birthday party of the 17-year-old baby of the family or an anniversary of two deceased spouses? Is it the meeting of an SME general assembly or the party conference of a provincial political party?

What is clear is that it is a meeting of disoriented people who have lost touch with world events outside their close circle of relationships. They express themselves with abstruse phrases that string together common idioms in a disjointed manner, while confused slogans or distorted melodies from the classical concert of wishes resound from numerous lined-up funeral urns.

Marthaler is playing a nasty game

Disoriented souls in grotesquely absurd situations, garnished with surprising intermezzi, are part of the basic inventory of Marthaler and his famously well-rehearsed stage family. However, in the current project with the strange title "Doctor Watzenreuther's Legacy - A Wishful Thinking Error", Marthaler is playing a nasty game that we are not used to seeing from him.

Not even the beautifully performed polyphonic songs of the ensemble, which range from Puccini and Wagner to Harold Melvin, have anything comforting about them. Marthaler and his stage crew lead us into the abysses into which people fall in their hopelessness: into the clutches of the AfD, the polemics of SVP populists, the US presidential candidate, the Rassemblement National, the Italian neo-fascists.

Only the rebellious and repeatedly reprimanded young woman (Nadja Reich) is left out. She plays her cello in a wonderful way against the decline and, at the end, lets the elegant and oppressive salon (an extremely lively stage: Duri Bischof) crumble into ruins.

Director warns of "an imposition"

In an interview with the reporter from the Keystone-SDA news agency before the performance, Marthaler warned of "an imposition that can also be seen as bad". Of an "impossible theatrical setting of a company lined up at a table" that you can't really place.

It may have been a bit of coquetry. But it wasn't bad at all. The evening was captivating due to the political and social explosiveness that shone through the subtly entertaining cloud. The premiere audience in Basel celebrated the evening, Marthaler and his ensemble with frenetic applause after two hours.

SDA