Jo Caird: Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

It’s
worth mentioning at this stage that I don’t speak any German at all.
But despite this obvious flaw in the plan, I found myself in ‘Platz’
11, ‘Reihe’ 3 of the Kammerspiele at Schauspiel Frankfurt, one of the
city’s leading theatres. I had opted for Alice
im Wunderland, on the presumption that at least I would
be familiar enough with the story to be able to more or less keep up
with the action. How wrong I was. This was no ordinary Alice
in Wonderland, but an avant-garde, all-singing,
all-dancing, one-woman Alice in Wonderland and
therefore a source of bafflement for me for almost the entire 75
minutes of the show.

This
bafflement didn’t stop me enjoying Alice im Wunderland,
however. The beauty of barely understanding a single word of the
performance is that essentially I can now decide for myself what the
show was about. I recognised certain elements of Lewis Carroll’s
story – the Caterpillar, the Cheshire Cat, the ‘Eat Me’ and ‘Drink
Me’ potions – but my ignorance of the language meant that the
director (Phillipp Preuss) and dramaturg’s (Sibylle Baschung) particular interpretation of the piece went nearly straight over my head. I took away from it that the Alice of
this Wonderland is a young woman undergoing an existential crisis,
confused and angered by the situation she finds herself in, but
that’s about as far as I got.

Not
being able to understand what the actor playing Alice was saying,
however, didn’t stop me from admiring her performance. In fact, I
think I was more aware of the physicality
of Valery
Tscheplanowa’s
superb portrayal,
as well as her excellent vocal control, than I might have been if the
circumstances were different. My attention was also drawn to the musician accompanying and underscoring her. Dressed in a
high-necked Victorian frock as a mirror to that latterly worn by
Tscheplanowa, Cornelius Heidebrecht used a loop machine and laptop,
as well as his haunting voice, to create an extraordinarily vibrant
soundtrack to the piece.

In
general I like my theatre comprehensible, but seeing a show in a
language I didn’t understand was a fascinating experience and one
that opened up the production for me in unexpected ways. Next time
you’re in a country whose language you’ve not yet mastered, I urge
you to take a chance on a show there and get a taste of another
culture’s theatre scene. Hals- und Beinbruch!