DThis has never existed before, even in Vienna. The curtain falls in the middle of the second act. Excited patter and swearing behind it. You start the act all over again. The actress of Hannah had forgotten an important brooch at the premiere of Tennessee Williams' “Night of the Iguana” that could not be replaced by gestures because it was the one that was being talked about and had to be worn visibly. But what did this actress care about a brooch? Where she would have burst into the word “brooch” alone, as into a foreign continent stretching across a surface brimming with wonder or terror? Where every word that comes off her tongue is the greatest but also the most difficult treasure, at the same time the most sparkling abyss. What was a poor prop brooch?
But if there is one actress who, worn by all the good spirits of fantasy, was allowed to forget a brooch, it is Angela Winkler. It has the right of those who are brilliantly absorbed in themselves to do so. That removes everything that is disturbing and thing-like around it into the fantastical. When she enters the scene, she comes from a world where others would be lost. And when she has filled and enchanted the scene with herself and her faces, her bright delusions and her dark phantasm music, she always goes into a world that others would not dream of. The wonderful thing about it: it's never finished. It is the life-playing denial of the main common mistake in German acting: finishing characters quickly, delivering them packaged and well tied up (with theories, technique, tralala).
Angela Winkler doesn't deliver. She doesn't have time for that because she takes endless time on her journeys into pieces and words and characters. She does almost nothing. At most, she brushes her long, thick hair away from her face, as if she were wiping away a mask. Or that she orders her body, which is always feverishly reeling in a gentle intoxication, to give a small, scurry Stop! jerk. A brief pause in a ceaseless process of self-immolation – which she ignites with nothing but her incredible eyes. She gets on the nerves of the dumber and less sensitive people in the dance floor. But it delights the ignitable eye game lovers. You have to look into them – or look away. There is no third.
The most wonderful tests of humility
Wherever she takes part, the unexpected happens. In 2002, in Peter Zadek's Viennese “Iguana” production, certainly not one of his more spectacular ones, she floated through the sultry jungle of Tennessee Williams as a daytime fantasist with nighttime visions, hearing the confession of a seducer and criminal, played by Ulrich Tukur, giving him poppy seed tea, potions of the Forgetfulness and vain simmered, writing down the last poem that her dying grandfather, played by the delicately tall Hermann Lause, blind and suffering from strokes, invented up into the impenetrable tropical sky, poetry of orange blossoms in a destroyed world – there was no skilled male therapist at work in the neurosis jungle . Rather, a priestess, a sorceress, a left-handed woman in a kimono, not from this world but from a region where all dreams bled and cut into the soul. And you could smile about it. Hours of truer sensations. A queen of hearts.
#Angela #Winkler #eightieth #birthday