“Caucasian Chalk Circle”: Brecht was impressively questioned at the Salzburg Festival

In doing so, they ensured an impressive premiere evening in the Salzburg scene on Saturday evening. Head of acting Bettina Hering has not given her director an easy task. You could see that in her rehearsal diary printed in the program booklet. Already in the press conference a few days ago, she said that Brecht’s publishers and heirs, who are notorious for their meticulous handling of the texts, had had a hard time. But it was agreed to relax. This paved the way for a separate version of the “Chalk Circle”, because a normal staging or acting of the text was not up for debate. Both the Rimini Protokoll collective and the Hora Theater have their very own philosophy when it comes to writing texts.

Pioneers for 30 years

The Horas from Zurich have been pioneers in their field for 30 years, because the ensemble consists of people with different degrees of cognitive impairment. So here and there you have to rely on technical aids, such as in-ear headphones, which give the players text and story support. But that didn’t diminish the actors’ enthusiasm or the audience’s enjoyment of watching them.

Brecht was not the first to take up the subject of a dispute between two mothers over a child. Who is the legal mother? The wealthy biological one who abandoned the child, or the penniless foster mother who risked her life to raise it? Since the Old Testament it has been a judge who is entrusted with the judgment. But during the joint rehearsals, Remo Beuggert, who plays the judge, came up with the idea of ​​breaking this chain. Instead of having the mothers try to pull the child towards them with a chalk-drawn circle, he would rather have asked the child who he saw as his mother. Not only as a judge did Beuggert pull the strings that evening. Ultimately for over two hours he acted as a great narrator, helping his colleagues through technical and text difficulties and driving the evening forward. But in the end, even he couldn’t prevent some answers from remaining unanswered.

love or luxury?

Helgard Haug’s idea was to completely dissect Brecht’s text and plot. In repeated rehearsals, the question of motherhood was always asked from a different angle. Who else could be a mother? Is love or luxury more important to a child? And finally, whether the maid Grusche (enchantingly emotional Simone Gisler) would have taken the child in if it had been sick and if so, would the governor’s wife (Tiziana Pagliaro) have had it at all?

In the end, the exciting questions were not answered. Instead, the audience found answers to personal questions for the ensemble in books distributed for one of the “rehearsals”. You had a good quarter of an hour to examine family photos and personal stories, while Minhye Ko provided the musical atmosphere with her drum and marimba playing, as she did throughout the evening. This action was probably well-intentioned, but involuntarily divided the evening, since the books had to be returned at the end of the performance and could therefore only be read parallel to the play if one wanted to deal with the biographies in a more accessible way. Even if the evening ended with an aftertaste of the unfinished, the audience was enthusiastic about the performance of the entire team.