Director Thorsten Lensing and his ensemble of top-tier theater, film, and television actors are absolute stage stars. For the production “Mad About Solace” (German: Verrückt nach Trost), Lensing intentionally entrusted the dramaturgy and stage design to people who don’t come from the theater world. Here, author and editor Dan Kolber describes how he experienced the rehearsals: how people transform into animals, adults become children, and time suddenly seems to slow down.
– May 31, 2023
We are publishing excerpts from Dan Kolber’s essay “No Closed World,” which appeared in the 2022 Salzburg Festival program for the premiere of “Mad for Solace.” Reprinted with the kind permission of Dan Kolber.
asphalt co-produced “Mad for Solace!” The play will be presented as part of this year’s festival on July 1 and 2 in the main hall of the Düsseldorf Schauspielhaus.
More about the play and advance ticket sales
When a human becomes an ape, the order of time is suspended. The evolutionary history of humanity—aiming at ever greater individuation—short-circuits. A development spanning millions of years dissolves in a moment of transformation.
Thorsten Lensing’s theater is a theater of immediacy. It’s never just about chaos, never just about fun, never just about precision, never just about human abysses—but always about the present. One of the central experiences in his productions is that the present can be saved—because in it, people and things are set free.
I myself do not come from the theater world, and neither did the architects Gordian Blumenthal and Ramun Capaul, who had never designed a stage set before working with Lensing. That’s not surprising: “No closed world, please,” is this director’s recurring mantra.
These were my first theater rehearsals. I saw people transform into a turtle and an ape. I saw Ursina Lardi and Devid Striesow become younger and younger. When they first slipped into the roles of siblings Felix and Charlotte, much of what the audience now sees in the first part of the performance was already there. But their age only slowly faded, step by step and in unexpected leaps. Suddenly, thirty-year-olds were standing before us performing the opening scene. Then they became twenty, seventeen, fifteen years old. Shortly before the premiere, Devid Striesow sat on the floor like an eleven-year-old, playing with the frayed edge of his bath towel, hands before him. He sat there as Felix, remembering, in completely permeable words, sentences of his late father—sentences that had now taken on such a peculiar weight in his mouth that they neither fell heavily to the ground nor floated lightly into the air, but hovered steadily, bringing the past into the present. Rarely does one experience so intensely that we carry sentences within us that are actually time capsules—preserving the moment when a specific person once spoke them to us in their unmistakable voice.
Memory and immediacy—both are essential to theater. Living with the invisible, pulling the absent into the present, reviving the present through play and at the same time blasting it open—these are the core motifs of “Mad About Solace”. And none of it is new. It belongs to the oldest traditions of humanity. The desire to transform and the importance of transformation are reflected in the earliest myths and rituals.
Charlotte and Felix play their dead parents at the beach. They imitate them with the precision of a child’s eye for the quirks of adults, and with a strong delight in exaggeration. When they portray them, they are so close to their parents that they forget their absence. They lend them their breath, their bodies, so that father and mother can return to reality through them. Loneliness disappears. The parents are not just present. The children are the parents. And through their ability to mimic the sensual closeness that once existed between mother and father, Charlotte and Felix grow closer again. When Ursina Lardi lies on the ground crying with laughter as Devid Striesow tickles her, you get a sense of how the game with the past melts into a fleeting moment of unburdened joy. Suddenly you hear the mother’s laughter coming from Charlotte’s mouth. The siblings revel in memories of their parents, reaching a state of exuberance that mirrors the parents’ past joy. The parents’ joy becomes the children’s joy. This is the most concrete way to swim against the current of time. It is a resurrection out of love.
That’s why it’s all the more painful to witness how the game dissolves into memory and comes to an end. Playing the past is something else than remembering it. In memory, we know that the current moment is forever separated from the remembered one. But in play, memory and present merge, and one can forget the loss. But at the moment when Charlotte as the mother takes the child—herself—into her lap, we feel a shift. She wants to exit the game, and she does so by separating herself from Felix. Instead of playing shared memories, she delves deeper into personal ones—intimate moments between her and the mother. Charlotte slips out of the game into memory, as if leaving the present. She no longer plays the mother; she hears her voice inside herself. It’s the moment when the parents are no longer being acted out, but appear as remembered figures on stage. In the game, the rule was that past and present were one—but now the dimensions of time separate again. The past is past. The two children are left alone. The parents are only memory fragments within them. We are shown the source from which all the prior play has arisen—and to which it returns: memory.
As Charlotte exits the game and separates from Felix, she transforms into an octopus. She severs ties with the past and throws herself, with all her energy and zest for life, into the present.
The idea of continuing Charlotte’s character as an octopus wasn’t the result of any premeditated, logical concept—it was rather the echo of the impression the character had made. Her need to manage on her own, her impulsive and multifaceted energy—all of it made this metamorphosis seem inevitable. The transformation is both the most natural and most desperate choice.
The dramaturgy of the first part is one of suddenness. Everything takes place in a space that is wide, open, and uncontrollable. The characters are as unpredictable and vast as the sea from which they emerge. They are not prisoners of our perceptual abilities. Rather, our perception must try to keep up with their vitality. That’s why the first part has no consistent, unified level of reality. Everything appears in the glowing, intense, garish hues of childhood.
One day during rehearsals, we were basically finished and some had already gone home, André Jung transformed himself into an ape for the first time. It was the longest transformation I’ve ever witnessed. It lasted at least 20 minutes. It began out of sight, behind us, and came unexpectedly. We’d all been waiting for the moment, the moment he’d show us his orangutan. But it wasn’t discussed; he chose the moment.
The silence was instantaneous, the atmosphere in the entire room—it was a wide, high-ceilinged rehearsal hall—suddenly changed. Perhaps it was because everyone involuntarily slowed their breathing. I lost all sense of time at that time. The time of ape is different from that of humans: My biological clock—not to mention the time of hours, minutes, and seconds—was suddenly no longer the dominant one, the only one in the room. Suddenly, we were all touched by the rhythm of the ape’s time. This other time in space was perhaps the first clearly recognizable sign of the transformation. I later recognized the same phenomenon in other transformations. We humans evidently possess an organ with which we unconsciously absorb the time of other living beings and store it within ourselves. The astonishing thing about these actors is that they evidently carry these different times within themselves and can access them at will.
When the orangutan came into view and we saw him in his entirety for the first time, an incredible tension arose. Our sense of reality briefly vanished. It was like a picture puzzle. Every movement of his arms or fingers, the entire posture of his body, followed a logic that suddenly emanated from this being and was no longer human. Not for a second during this process did we have any communication with André Jung that we ourselves could understand. It would never have occurred to me to speak to him. We were captivated by the aura of this strange being and wanted to see and understand what the ape would do next.
Devid Striesow was sitting on the floor not far away, for it was he, after all—Felix—who was dreaming the ape. It wasn’t easy for him to deal with André Jung. The orangutan was wild and untamed. But slowly, the tension eased—they became more familiar. And when André Jung gently, yet dully bowed his hand to Striesow’s neck and softly, yet precisely touched his hair and skin with a curled finger, we understood something about the origins of tenderness—a tenderness five million years old.
Sebastian Blomberg’s first transformation was also something special. He turned into a turtle. The first time I saw it, I was mesmerized by such tender slowness. How can a human decelerate like that?
The most exciting part was always what the animals saw. Animals never see what humans see. Their interests are entirely different. Sebastian Blomberg never looked higher than a turtle would. He saw the world from below: no people, only legs. You could feel that he could not possibly see our faces. You notice it instantly when you’re no longer being seen. Humans look at each other—we can usually read their gaze, and we always feel it. I knew I was in the presence of animals when I felt I was no longer being looked at.
The animals in this piece are not symbols. They are rather an attempt to do justice to the complexity of the world without reduction—a reflex against the tendency to place humans in an empty space and dissect them with abstract concepts. It is a rebellion against the loneliness of man, against his removal from the environment.
During rehearsals, laughter became an important form of communication. Precision in portraying the world came through joy and empathy. There was joy that what one saw was often even better than what one had hoped. Laughter responded to every detail and encouraged the actors in their explorations—without ever taking them out of the immediacy of their play. The humor in ” Verrückt nach Trost” is not just an expression of joy. It is also a way of coping with one’s own powerlessness…
In den Proben wurde das Lachen zu einer wichtigen Kommunikationsform. Die Präzision in der Wiedergabe der Welt wurde durch Freude und Empathie erzeugt. Es war die Freude darüber, dass das, was man sah, fast immer noch um einiges besser war als das, was man sich erhofft hatte. Das Lachen reagierte auf jedes Detail und bestärkte die Schauspielerinnen und Schauspieler in ihren Erkundungen, ohne sie jemals aus der Unmittelbarkeit ihres Spiels herauszunehmen. Die Komik in »Verrückt nach Trost« ist nicht allein Ausdruck von Freude. Sie ist auch eine Art und Weise, mit der eigenen Ohnmacht umzugehen, ein Versuch, sich der Erfahrung zu stellen, dass es Dinge im Leben gibt, die man nicht ändern kann. Sie ist eine Notwehr gegen das Unabänderliche.
The second half of the evening begins, like the first, with sensual closeness. We see the physical union of two men. They are tightly embraced, yet very far apart. However, curiosity and interest lead to trust over the course of their conversation. Whether this trust leads to true closeness and whether Felix will ultimately be less lonely remains open.
In the final scene, we see Charlotte shortly before her death. In a nursing home, she celebrates her 88th birthday with a care robot. The robot knows exactly what to give her. It helps Charlotte regain a sense of self-confidence that she had almost completely lost. Nothing disturbs it. In the middle of the conversation, she begins to yodel. It yodels along and hits exactly the notes that evoke feelings of happiness in her. The tension and imbalance of her entire life dissolves before our eyes.
