Vom Zauber einer
verwehenden Sprache
(On the magic of a
vanishing language)
In an era of the gradual destruction of language and general sensory overload, Ulrich Tukur and Christian Redl revisit the origins of theatre: Language as the most honest teller of good stories. Both actors were exposed to the great German poems in their youth; Ulrich Tukur through his father, who recited Goethe and Schiller at bedtime, and Christian Redl through legendary evenings and album recordings with Klaus Kinski. Besides their favourite poems, they are dedicating themselves to a non-contemporary form of the art of storytelling. For the older generation, it still evokes memories of their schooldays that are not always pleasant. Ballads are often masterfully told short stories that vividly and manifestly describe the things that also make crime fiction so thrilling: Seduction, loyalty and treachery, unrequited love, life and death. All of these highbrow tones and rhymes merely cloak their similarity to broadsides, comedies and colportage: They are like an old form of tabloid newspaper written in classic metres. With their voices only, subtle facial expressions, a vast amount of stage experience and texts by Goethe, Fontane, Brecht and Enzensberger, Ulrich Tukur and Christian Redl create imaginary worlds that are deeply moving, because they are always about terrible twists of fate. With compositions that were often written at the same time as the texts, the pianist Olena Kushpler responds to the spoken words on the piano.
