ARCHIVES 2009 / Riesenbutzbach, eine Dauerkolonie

It is a whole gallery of inimitable characters, lost and often awkward grown-up children, which is summoned here in a unique universe whose secret is only known by the director, Christoph Marthaler, and his set designer, Anna Viebrock. In a Europe where East and West have become so similar, prey to the dual desire to possess and protect their goods, these contemporary heroes will occupy a set with multiple spaces – a family house, a bank, a shopping mall, a dormitory, garages –, to recount and sing their obsessions, fears and desires. As often with Christoph Marthaler, humour blends in with melancholy: the music and singing create  suspended moments of poetry, on a rhythm that alternates slowness and speed, sudden twists and repetitions. On stage, anything can happen since strangeness is claimed as the very driving force of this show, built around small events, little stories that are interwoven, sometimes leaning towards the absurd. The actors' freedom, their incredible lightness, their peerless talent for going from a popular song to a Schubert lied or a Beethoven opera, all this contributes to keeping us in a state of permanent expectation. For we grow fond of these characters, so close to us, lost in an aggressive world, traumatised by a stifling universe, but who, nevertheless, know how to recall the beauty of life and the joy of being together. Staging a society in which everyone succeeds in monitoring the whole world, without even knowing why, in a law-and-order spiral that risks making people lose the idea of the most essential values, Christoph Marthaler knows how to home in on our contradictions, to be attentive to our excesses, both as a tireless observer of society and a poet of the stage. JFP