GIt is well known that the characters of Anton Chekhov, who are aware of their turn of the epoch, ask themselves what posterity will think of them one day. As in the classic “Onkel Wanja” performed by Tomi Janežič with the ensemble of the State Small Theater from Vilnius, they usually have nothing good to say about it: They are too caught up in their own inertia, and it is too late for them to face the consequences of their wrong ones conscious of idealizations. This applies first and foremost to the eponymous Wanja (Arūnas Sakalauskas), who, after 25 years of toil on the estate of a professor he has admired for a long time, realizes that he gave his life and energy for a charlatan. His second young wife Elena (Indrė Patkauskaitė) and his daughter Sonja (Ilona Kvietkutė) fare no better: While the former no longer finds anything in her much too old husband, the latter suffers from her unrequited love for the actual protagonist of the play, the country doctor Astrow.
Martynas Nedzinskas plays him with a mullet and leather jacket in such an adorable mixture of stoic sobriety and periodic emotional outbursts that you immediately want to nominate him for a role in a Kaurismäki film. In general, there is a post-heroic aura about what is happening, for which Bowie’s “Heroes” provides the introductory musical framework: In the backward Russian provinces of the turn of the century, there is really nothing for anyone to win, especially since everyone is far too tired or too drunk to seriously to think of leaving. This is especially true for the male staff, who are constantly mislit or outshone by the shifting spotlight.
Comedy and the occasional surging drama are wonderfully balanced in Janežič’s production, even if there is a fight in between or Wanja fires two pistol shots, which of course miss their target. The Slovenian director consistently finds suitable images and, above all, an excellent rhythm for Chekhov’s lack of events and results. He takes plenty of time for this in the more than four-hour production, which is also needed to allow the wonderfully harmonious ensemble to play out in peace.
Contemporary, violent world literature
It is theater without the need for special effects, with finely composed scenes, which knows how to transport Chekhov’s entire fascination for what is non-eventful and only subtly hinted at. On the bare stage, lined with pressboard and equipped with only a few worn pieces of furniture, Janežič cleverly allows the historical dimensions of the original to recede behind the timeless depiction of the human being as a tragi-comically failing idealization machine.
In contrast, the festival world premiere of “La obra”, the contribution of the Argentine playwright Mariano Pensotti, is radically contemporary. For his piece, he uses a theme that authors such as WG Sebald and Roberto Bolaño developed more than a quarter of a century ago, and who, as Pensotti proves, continue to reliably produce epigones. We are talking about a kind of “post-Holocaust world literature” that follows a more or less fixed recipe. Take: a mysterious figure with an opaque World War past, a detective-like narrator, a murmuring undertone and the interconnection of a few moments in the global history of modern violence, and spice it all up with a pinch of mise en abyme and plenty of docu-fictional jewellery.
#Wiener #Festwochen #Productions #Tomi #Janežič #Mariano #Pensotti