A queen in a prefab

Vienna – At first glance, Mechthild Magda Huschke is cut from the same moth-eaten, fairy-tale cloth as Werner Schwab’s lavatory-soiled The Presidents: a particularly dainty creature, she is the product of Oliver Bukowski’s imagination. Born in 1961, Bukowski is a playwright from Cottbus who is little known around here. He is an advocate of ‘eastern’ sensitivities and perhaps for that reason is always only about to become a star. Mechthild carries a head full of blood and wounds on her narrow shoulders. She is gifted with an unrealistic imagination filled with outdated attitudes. But she is also stricken with illusionary common sense that reliably takes her beyond the limits of her erotic prefab.

Bukowski’s monologue, which the actress Alexandra Sommerfeld delivers in a self-sacrificingly ambiguous way as an enigmatic queenly drama at the dietheater Konzerthaus, is also a trick that Mechthild miraculously plays on herself. Nichts Schöneres (nothing better) is the title of this wishful phantasmagoria that was originally pieced together from parts in Saxon and Berlin dialects.

It is a testament to how the dirty and disgusting sides of life can be recast as an inviolable monument to heroines. And as if to add insult to injury, it leaves no doubt that the protagonist lives in a most cheerful delusion: her symptoms are at the same time a prerequisite for a wonderful bliss therapy.

And that begins in this biographical maze of a miserable housewife who has stuffed her husband in the wood chipper, who allowed herself to be licked ‘down below’ in the women’s prison and, after placing a personal ad upon her release, finds fulfilment in the arms of a pathetic, ‘drop-shaped’, atrocious hobby poet.

Director Sabine Mitterecker and the Theater.Punkt team refuse anything that could encourage compassion for Mechthild; instead, Sommerfeld’s portrayal is always somewhat detached from the character. In front of an oval prison made of cloth on a three-step podium, she draws the potentials for warmth and pain out of the repertoire of the bourgeois soul like discarded masks. In a hooped skirt with a velvet latticed collar, she stages her dual role as whore and monarch on an invisible high wire over the abyss of her presumably broken but hopelessly cheerful disposition.

Independent theatre should draw on the interpretations offered by this unusual production for a long time. Mechthild makes it possible.’

Ronald Pohl | DER STANDARD