The final premiere tomorrow! “Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne”. It’s my favourite play. And a radical experiment. The two actors on stage stay silent for almost one hour before they say a word. It’s the sourrounding voices, that talk, and in so doing create, invent and discard them.
Susanne Lietzow is an amazing director. It’s an honor to work with her. I am really looking forward to that night. I would be very relaxed, if there wasn’t this panel discussion after the show. On stage: Susanne, me, the Art-brut-Museum-Gugging’s manager and a well-known moderator from the public radio. Gugging once was a famous Austrian psychiatric clinic. Now it’s a museum and a colony of outsider artists. It is the place, where August Walla and Ernst Herbeck, the schizophrenic characters of my play, lived before they died. A discussion with the museum’s manager will be a challenge. In some way, my play is an attack on his work and world view. He transformed the inapprehensible life and art of these artists into well wraped madness-packages, into products to be traded and sold in the worldwide art market. (And insanity is a rewarding attribute in terms of branding his products: It’s just a black hole, everyone can project his longings or fears into.) He deleted their biographies, claiming that there would be no difference between the art of “normal” or “psychotic” artists (This indeed could be a good point! But not in the way he put it: “The piece of art is just a product without a relevant history.”), and in the same time, he organized guided tours around the artist’s living quarters, as if their home was a freak show. So: He joins our theater night. He comes to turn it into his marketing event. I’ll hopefully be able to prevent that. On the basis of thoughtful and calm arguments.
Find an interview about “Ein schöner Hase ist meistens der Einzellne” here.
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