ARCHIVES 2012 / Meine Faire Dame. Ein Sprachlabor

It was in 1956, on the stage of the Mark Ellinger Theater on Broadway, that the little flower-seller Eliza Doolittle whom her mentor, the distinguished Professor Higgins, who wanted to transform her into a lady, by teaching her to speak the beautiful English of the aristocracy, appeared. Today, Christoph Marthaler has taken hold, in twisting it of course, of this moving story to turn it into a moment of musical madness, imagined for the fantastic troupe of actors that he has brought together. If syntax, semantics and grammar are still on the programme, it is in a language laboratory composed of small extremely realistic cubicles that Marthaler's heroes once again present their anxiety about time passing, their antiquated melancholy and their very touching solitude. They are all there to do, between two silences, their number: to sing, alone or in a chorus, a moment from The Enchanted Flute, Silent Night, Holy Night, Schumann's Scenes from Childhood or the Wham! hit Last Christmas. Because everything is possible in Christoph Marthaler's world: Karajan can meet Frankenstein in it, the group tasting of an apple is transformed into a genuine vocal concert, diction exercises are changed into an irresistibly comic rehearsal. Through the grace of the singers, actors and clowns that inhabit it, this laboratory then becomes an exhilarating space of freedom, a hilarious dreaming on language. JFP