BEUTE FRAUEN KRIEG

Director Karin Henkel (who was invited to the very first Swiss Theatre Festival in 2014 with Amphitryon) places the women of the Trojan War at the centre of her production at the Schiffbauhalle, as the losers in a male world of war: a suffering Andromache, a triple Helen who abjures all guilt, and a sacrificed Iphigenia. Has nothing changed in the mechanisms of power and the victors’ abuse of that power since the days of Euripides? Beute Frauen Krieg (Bounty Women War) is a sinister triad, exposing the dark underbelly of heroic tales.

The audience hears the beginning of the play whispered through headsets as they move around the arena stage erected in the Schiffbauhalle; in the middle of the play, the hall and the audience are divided into three and, in a triptych, the pre-war and post-war history of the Trojan War is recounted from the women's point of view. There's an exquisite intimacy when the splendid Carolin Conrad stands in front of a bare wall and tells us how a slave girl, with a child, was not the kind of bounty that Achilles sought. As the tacky and Barbie-like Kate Strong, Hilke Altenfrohe and Isabell Menke totter through Helen's petty-bourgeois living room, we are drained, and language intentionally fails. There is an awkward intimacy when Dagna Litzenberger Vinet is prepared for the great Agamemnon. The fifth part brings all the players together, after the intermission; does the order in which we’ve seen the three middle sections affect the dramatic impact of the fifth part?

Karin Henkel and her set designer Muriel Gerstner make superb use of the Hall’s potential.  Timing is of the essence when characters move from one space into the next. The excellent ensemble functions brilliantly, and individual destinies are used to chronicle historic events. We are so close to the action - at times even unpleasantly so - but at the same time always part of world history and theatre history. In both form and substance Beute Frauen Krieg is a great and forceful evening of theatre, intelligently conceived, constructed and staged. It is a play that uses the theatre's resources and is compelling in its depiction of the substantive connections between the ancient writings and the world of today, and in so doing it clearly makes a stand and takes sides.

(Tobias Gerosa)

• distrib

  Direction
  Karin Henkel

  With
  Hilke Altefrohne, Carolin Conrad, Christian Baumbach, Dagna Litzenberger Vinet, Fritz Fenne, Isabelle Menke, Kate Strong, Lena Schwarz, Michael Neuenschwander, Milian Zerzawy

  Stage design
  Muriel Gerstner

  Costumes
  Teresa Vergho

  Music
  Arvild J. Baud

  Light
  Michel Güntert

  Dramaturgy
  Anna Heesen

  Production
  Schauspielhaus Zürich

   

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