Theater criticism / The persons and the roles

The purpose of my works”, declared Heiner Müller, “is to find the lost unity of man with the ‘whole’, so that the dangerous utopias die and we arrive at the eternal purgatory return of pain and murder”. According to him, “the only way out is the deconstruction of the cultural forms that divide, in order to reach, through the awareness of the only reality, chaos, the lost, palinton harmony of Heraclitus, a synthesis that is beyond the world of forms, more or less illusory, which divides nature into individuals’.

Words more reminiscent of Nietzsche, with some aroma of metabolised Heidegger. Because if the postmodern West’s soteriological view of man and the world is this, then the search for man’s lost unity with the world becomes simply a game of mirror images. Because, even if we assume that there is beyond man an asinine “whole”, from which a human consciousness-unit was once detached to follow its own trajectory, then the “whole” ceases to be a whole. It becomes a traumatic, elliptical entity that threatens to swallow and assimilate the unit-consciousness. So that the elliptical entity returns to the timeless ahistorical “whole” that it was. We have seen this happen many times throughout history. And, finally, because the ancient Greek tragedy that Miller competes with does not step into the area of ​​need, but of freedom.

The eternal return of suffering and murder, according to Miller, without freedom remains merely a shape or mark of man on the mire of existence for theatrical representation. A staged return of man to nothingness, retaining only a faint memory of himself. Against the light that things emit. Inside a platonic cave, with no way out. This original way of Heiner Müller to see the world, even if we do not embrace it, gave birth to his original theater. Let’s take a closer look.

His finest and most complete work, “Quartet”, based on Laclos’ earlier novel “Dangerous Liaisons”, is a theatrical essay on impossible human relationships, where the four characters of the novel become two, Valmont and Merteig, i.e. one, the archetypal primordial androgynous creature, in a deadly embrace for the supremacy of one. A theater within the theater, where Valmont alternately becomes Merteig and Merteig Valmont, until the roles are separated, the masks fall and the faces are condemned to the solitary individuality of the separate sex, since then searching painfully and in vain for their lost other half .

“The Quartet” is a musical, essentially theatrical piece, requiring from its performers a physical language, tuned to musical rhythms, with a shared understanding of the disappearing void that threatens to cancel the roles in every syllable uttered without the corresponding musical rhythm consistency. It requires actors capable of using speech as a score.

The direction of Thanasis Sarantou, in a competent translation by Eleni Varopoulou, sees the work in its proper musical theater dimension and directs it like a camera with an experienced baguette. The two great actors, the excellent Kerasia Samaras and the highly capable Christos Vassilopoulos, possess the corresponding qualities: a physical language, a musical language and a perception of stage space and time beyond the conventional, so as to exceed its given limits and gender commitments. With the help of the costume design (aesthetic costumes by Marios Karavasilis), the assistance of the perfect scenery (Thalia Istikopoulou), the contribution of the homeopathic lighting (Stevi Koutsothanasis), the audible music (Konstantinos Evagelidis) and the editing of movement by Plotinos Iliadis.

Kerasia Samara, with solidity of body and sympathy of soul, launches the role of Valmont-Merteig to the highest point of passion. Christos Vassilopoulos, with sympathy of body and solidity of soul, grounds the role of Merteig-Valmont in the most clay step of the math.