In view of the current pressure to reduce, it does not seem entirely absurd to see the chamber play, with its manageable use of figures and material and its restriction to the essentials of the theatre, as a state-of-the-art genre.
In any case, the Vienna Burgtheater is starting the new season with two premieres of this kind in the form of Thomas Bernhard's "Am Ziel" and Daniel Kehlmann's "Nebenan", although the contrast between the two could hardly have been greater.
On the one hand, Matthias Rippert makes his debut with a thrilling production of "Am Ziel", in which a mother and her daughter prepare for their annual summer vacation on the Dutch coast.
This time, however, the signs are different: after a theatrical performance, a “dramatic writer” was spontaneously invited to accompany them on the journey.
However, this is preceded by the process of packing the suitcase, which takes up most of the piece, in which the ballast of the family history weighs heavier than the coats and clothes.
All of its dark facets are mercilessly poured out in a cognac-soaked suada by the (like all characters nameless) widow of a deceased foundry owner over her mostly silent daughter.
Tenderness attacks and hail of injuries
Dörte Lyssewski plays this mother outstandingly, who made it from the poorest of circumstances to an entrepreneur's wife through maximum mercilessness towards herself and others.
In her obsessive working through of these bourgeois abysses, hatred and disgust dominate in Bernhard's typical “art of exaggeration”: for the husband who was despised all his life, for the disabled son who was never loved and died early, and also for the daughter, who is mediocre in all aspects of life.
The sound of this proto-exorcist act is the crunching of the china, which was smashed at the very beginning, and which can be heard insistently for over two hours under the feet of the two opposing women, on a stage that Fabian Liszt has completely cleared up to two rows of seats.
It is an overwhelming theatrical experience: How Dörte Lyssewski, with her powerful vocal and physical repertoire, goes beyond the pressure to dramatize this absolute and at the same time deeply torn matriarchal female ruler figure and for more than two hours non-stop uses all registers between grotesque self-exposure and emotional coldness, between attacks of tenderness and vulgar-animalistic failures.
No less magnificent is Maresi Riegner's daughter, who, as one of Bernhard's "silent figures", artfully walks the line between debility and deviousness.
Like an experienced boxer, she avoids her mother's verbal humiliations and stoically lets her showers of injuries roll off her body.
This reveals the full power of the supposedly subjugated daughter: she refuses the begging behind the maliciousness of her mother for recognition of her self-torture and lifelong toil.
Instead, this love-hate relationship between the two is repeatedly fought out in excellently staged physical confrontations, such as the daughter giving her mother a rude back massage or her re-enactment of arguments with the deceased man while hitting the body of the “father’s child” who reminded him.