The dead dragon lies under the wild boar skin. In any case, he is flat right at the beginning, and Siegfried (Jakob Schmidt) stands in front of it like a deer in the headlights: What? I? Oops! Well, that’s how quickly one becomes king.
The Nibelungen saga, which belongs to the literary canon of the history of the Teutonic founding, is not only the subject of school lessons, but literally begs for a satirical interpretation. The dramatist Kristo Šagor, rightly overwhelmed with modernist honours, was happy to take on the bulky material: Last Wednesday, his minimalist interpretation with the cool name “Nibelungenleader” finally celebrated its premiere in the Reithalle after being postponed due to illness.
“A man with a bloody sword is just a man with a bloody sword” – yes, you can go along with it. However, it is not Wagner’s Siegfried who anxiously clutches his sword, but the involuntary hero of an all too weird production, which the ensemble took over without further ado – with the support of director Michael Böhnisch. The result is a grotesque that intentionally spits in the soup of the most Teutonic of all sagas, but without whose background it doesn’t work.
Short version: Siegfried rises to become the reluctantly invincible dragon slayer and marries Kriemhild (Lara Heller). Her brother Gunther (Hannes Schumacher) and his liege man Hagen (Henning Strübbe) then convince Siegfried to defeat Gunther in a fight with the Icelandic queen Brynhild (hilarious: Mascha Schneider) and thereby make him his wife. Years later, so that the fraud doesn’t get exposed – and because queens are quarrelsome – things escalate, in which Hagen kills Siegfried, whereupon Kriemhild swears revenge.
Tight and refreshing played through
But Potsdam is not Bayreuth, where the Nibelungen are honored in pompous opera cycles. It was still theatrical, even if that was due to the satirical interpretation – a little less would have been good. After all: The piece is played through so tightly and refreshingly that it is simply a joy. And of course it focuses on the 13+ target group, vulgar language included.
But when so much energy is expended to give this dusty chunk of the Nibelung a fresh coat of paint, the sublime imagery of the piece is admittedly lost a bit: what is betrayal? Loyalty? Fault? And isn’t the punishment of the Amazon Brynhild actually a rape? At some point you look at the helpless faces of the young guests: In the end it was just crass shit.
To home page
