DIE KAHLE SÄNGERIN

The play is about Mr and Mrs Smith, who are waiting for an unexpected visit from their friends, the Martins. The latter get to know each other only after arriving at the Smiths'. People talk about this and that by keeping silent, and time, with its contradictory spirit, does as it pleases too. The Fire Chief is urgently looking for a fire, but the fire business is going badly, and the maid, whose name is Mary, wants to recite a poem. Or perhaps it is about something else entirely.

THERE IS NO COMMON THREAD IN THIS PLAY,

BUT WE'LL GET SOMEWHERE ALL THE SAME!

PRESS
BEZIRKSBLATT (28.3.2012)

BRENNPUNKT (15.03.2012)

Imaginative spatial installation with artfully acting figures: a brilliant performance by Günther Ettel, Nathalie Sprenger, Sabine Brlozanovic, Bettina Kattge, Susanne Schartner and Lukas Gander.

TIROLER TAGESZEITUNG (12.03.2012)

EXPERIMENTS IN NO MAN'S LAND
"Die kahle Sängerin" as a quarry of material: Markus Plattner directs Ionesco.
Eugène Ionesco's play "Die kahle Sängerin" is a warhorse of modern dramatic literature, one of the founding manifestos of the "Theatre of the Absurd", an attack on the armchair-psychology offerings of naturalistic wicker-chair conversations, a rejection of the raised finger of schoolmasterly explainers of the world and of many another stage tradition.
Of course, the attack on the classics has long since become a classic itself, and the warhorse is in danger of drowning in a swamp of professorial interpretation and conventionalised performance practice. Markus Plattner pays little heed to such customs anchored in their conventionality. On the contrary: within the first few minutes it becomes clear that any prior knowledge, and the expectations it feeds, can safely be thrown overboard. This "kahle Sängerin" sees itself as a consistent step towards abstraction, and Ionesco's text as a quarry of material. Only the rough framework of the plot (already more of a non-plot in the original) is retained; everything else is at best hinted at.
Mr Smith (Günther Ettel) and his wife ('Susanne Schartner) receive an unannounced visit from the Martins (Nathalie Sprenger and Bettina Kattge) and fail at "small talk". Neither the arrival of a fireman (Lukas Gander) nor the maid Mary (Sabine Brlozanovic) changes that.
Who says what here is essentially unimportant. It is about the how, the so-called "basics", about tone colours, about the effect that mechanically rattled-off cascades of words or stage speech heightened into affectation can have.Markus Plattner stages "Die kahle Sängerin" as an experimental set-up in no man's land: supposedly fixed quantities, such as locations or causal consequences, even clearly defined gender roles, have no value here. Anyone who compulsively tries to find a deeper meaning here has only themselves to blame and is fighting a losing battle. But anyone who accepts that there is little to discover, yet all the more to experience, will get their money's worth.(Joachim Leitner)

KRONENZEITUNG (11.03.2012)

SOMEWHERE & NOWHERE
The Lendbräu theatre in Schwaz is currently whisking audiences away into the surreal. With Ionesco's "Die kahle Sängerin" it succeeds in an excursion into disorientation, holding up a mirror to meaningless etiquette. Verdict: well worth seeing!
.... Markus Plattner's production carries us off to somewhere and nowhere. The set (Barbara Hölzl) underlines the illusion. In the perfect setting for the absurd, the actors flirt with the melody of language through changes of rhythm and emphasis. The content plays with etiquette and empty phrases. The feat succeeds! (diwo)

Letter from Dr. Ekkehard SCHÖNWIESE, dramaturge, Theaterverband Tirol, 28.02.2012

" .....Die kahle Sängerin, by Ionesco. Theatre of the Absurd. Oh, we know that! Don't we? No, we don't. Nor do we need to know such a thing. If you don't feel it, don't live it, don't experience it, don't surrender to the mystery, it is all nothing. Then the verdict is quickly reached: here language is broken down, here the order of things is called into question. Rehearsal at the Theater im Lendbräukeller.

Here I falter already. What does rehearsal mean? That would imply a product that is finished. There will be no premiere. Nor will there be any performances. Something will take place:
There will be an entrance: the entrance into a world before – before reality. "No, no, please don't go in early," says Markus Plattner. Why? "You should fill the space together." Later I think: we who watch, and are not merely spectators but are drawn into what happens, must not come as individuals. The audience as the sounding board of the play – this thought comes to me afterwards.

And it resonates long afterwards, this rehearsal. The singer is not bald, and neither is the stage. It is in fact exceedingly colourful and full of graphic signs, somehow reminiscent of bizarre graphics, of cave paintings.
I have certainly read many clever things about the Theatre of the Absurd, but I gladly put aside what I have of it in my head. After all, the point is to switch it off. That is what matters. It cannot be grasped. It does not want my grip. It wants me to let go! To finally hang up the meanings with which words are degraded, and to expose myself naked to reality.

They are all dressed in white, the figures moving in front of the colourful reality behind them, white and innocent, chromosomes in a cell.
The birth of theatre from the spirit of painting and music and words released from the body.
The exercise at the beginning is called tapping. Two actors gently drum on the resonating body of the third until the breath lets the voice vibrate along. Until everyone has been tapped, language has no meaning yet. At the beginning there is attunement. Like a small child playing with sounds, as if it had to explore what kind of space this is, all around, outside its own body, so the concert develops, first of sounds and then of words, at first without meaning, and then anchored in scraps of language.

And to the very end it remains a playing that plays around everyday logic, like a satellite of planet Earth.

After this process, which is akin to a birth, which echoes the pain of coming into the world, sentences begin to form which claim in all seriousness to have a meaning. They are embedded in singsong. It is as when a mother rocks a child so that, in the warmth of closeness, language games can begin.
Welcome to the world of Ionesco.
And when sentences suddenly stand in the room, horror inevitably follows. An outcry! Oh God, I have formed a sentence! I have let it out of me, and now it stands there in the world and others can use it and pin me down. And it was only an attempt!

A rehearsal at the Lendbräu. In short: I felt carried far back to a time of discovery, of joy in being here, and of grief at parting from the star on our forehead that is taken from us at birth ....."