Schauspielhaus Graz
“Iokaste: The mother of war and her children
A mother struggles for peace between her hostile sons - desperately and in vain: Schauspielhaus Graz presents "Iokaste" by Roland Schimmelpfennig, an impressive new adaptation of an ancient play.
"There must be peace", says Iocaste and invites her hostile sons Eteocles and Polyneikes to the negotiating table. They sit bitterly and irreconcilably opposite each other at the barren table (stage: Hannah von Eiff). They both claim to rule over their hometown of Thebes and both have their reasons for doing so. But no matter how much the mother insists on reconciliation, the brothers will not be able to overcome their personal grievances and the fate of their family. War is as inevitable as it is all-encompassing. In the end, Iokaste will sit between the corpses of her sons and ask: "What now?"
Pure elemental power of the theater
Playwright Roland Schimmelpfennig has reworked the ancient material for the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, focusing in particular on the mother's diplomatic failure. In Graz, "Iokaste" is now celebrating its Austrian premiere and director Anne Bader and her team are relying entirely on the pure elemental power of theater: the text and the actors are the stars of this 70-minute tour de force.
The end of the characters resonates in all the performances from the very beginning: Karola Niederhuber as Iokaste seems to know right from the start that she will be unsuccessful with her diplomatic efforts - she tries anyway. And Robert Maximilian Rausch as Eteocles and Mario Lopatta as Polyneikes also present their characters in such a way that, despite all the big words, no path to peace seems possible. Dominik Puhl as Menoikeus anticipates the bloody end several times with his desperate suicides.
Wall show from antiquity to the present day
Schimmelpfennig unobtrusively and eloquently incorporates contemporary crises into the ancient material: In particular, he has the sisters Ismene (Anna Klimovitskaya) and Antigone (Luisa Schwab) conjure up all-too-familiar images of diplomatic failure around the world's many theaters of war and its dramatic effects on civilians in a kind of wall show from antiquity to the present day.
The result is a dense, timeless evening of theater that, in all its dark tragedy, shows how strong the myth of war is and how difficult it is to fight it. Of course, like Iokaste, you still have to try and try again.
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