Dhe heart of the revolution beats loudly and with passion. The red light installation with the pumping heart muscle, which is so much more than just a physical organ, hangs over the stage of the Frankfurter Schauspiel like a threatening sword of Damocles. It is not only those who act who are guilty, but also those who do not act. Sartre’s play “The Dirty Hands” from 1948 is based on the classic predicament, as formulated by the former Federal President Gauck, loosely adapted from Saint-Just.
The lesson from the fictional Balkan state of Illyria, in which a regent has to come to terms with the German occupiers while the Red Army is already at the border and surrender is only a matter of time, was influenced by the Nazi occupation of France , but also the Stalinist purges emerged. The specific reason was the assassination of Trotsky after his criticism of Stalin. “Les mains sales” was not only Sartre’s most successful drama, but also his greatest defeat. So big that he repeatedly had its performance banned. But in vain: since the Paris premiere, which classified the dispute as anti-communist, the author, who associated himself with the revolutionary parties and later did not hesitate to visit the terrorist Andreas Baader in Stammheim, saw himself as a “reactionary” condemned by the communist party.
Realos against Fundis
The conflict between pragmatism and idealism is negotiated in Sartre’s play with the help of two people: Hugo, the very young, hot-headed intellectual from a bourgeois family, who up until now has only been able to fight for the party newspaper with words, finally wants to take action, which is why he took the risk of murder a “traitor”, party secretary Hoederer.
The story is told as a flashback. At the beginning, the murder happened two years ago, and Hugo, who thought he was on the party line at the time, is now to be liquidated himself. Because Hoederer’s once ostracized policy of compromise is now party doctrine. The young revolutionary has three hours to prove to the militant partisan Olga that he is still “usable” for the party – and the party is always right. Like Scheherazade in “1001 Nights”, Hugo talks about his life. Sartre’s seven-act play jumps back and into the verbal duels between the Realo and the Fundi and the question of how far one can cooperate with the enemy in order to save human lives.
Odd masks plus towering hairstyles make for effective mystery.
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Image: Birgit Hupfeld
The dilemmatic starting point could not be more topical. However, Lilja Rupprecht’s direction resists the temptation to make direct allusions to the war in Ukraine or Western cooperation with unjust states such as Iran, China or Saudi Arabia. Contemporary historical references have also been stripped out in Eva Groepler’s streamlined retranslation, in favor of showing an utterly alien Illyria populated by people wearing idiosyncratic masks with piled-up hairstyles, creating an effective mystique. When the Illyrians then take off their masks, they suddenly appear very intimate and vulnerable.
The outstanding Frankfurt ensemble manages to elicit its burlesque qualities from Sartre’s thunderstorm of theses until a tragic comedy emerges from the cloak of Brecht’s didactic play and sometimes even vaudeville. In Hoederer, Matthias Redlhammer skilfully reveals the pragmatist with calculation who, as a political professional, does not shy away from “reaching the shit” for the sake of the right thing, while Fridolin Sandmeyer as the brooding Hugo seems to be the most surprised by his own radicalism.
Female wonder
Sartre’s situation theatre, “which confronts us with exceptional situations such as imprisonment, oppression, torture and makes contradictions between existence and role transparent”, as he put it in his essay “The Myth and Reality of Theater”, sounds theoretically constructed, but in this Frankfurter Theater evening filled with life. Not only Redlhammer and Sandmeyer carry the production (stage: Anne Ehrlich) with their witty contrast game, which is additionally charged by the younger boy’s father complex, because the class defector Hugo does not succeed in really stripping off his origins.
The evening is also supported by the actresses Manja Kuhl as Olga and Lea Ruckpaul as Jessica, Hugo’s provocatively playful wife. These are only supposedly supporting roles, because in fact her female astonishment at the male dispute becomes the central perspective when one opposes the cold party line with her longing, while the other, supposedly non-political, develops a moral consciousness. Two women not only walk from opposite ends, but come from two different worlds, a long way towards each other.
And anyone who just thought they were in a possibly outdated piece of theater history that tells of a time that has neither anything to say nor can amaze us today, because Sartre was concerned with demonstrating a thesis, for which he created characters from lifeless ideas tinkered is most amazingly surprised: by Hugo, the murderer, who not only carries the gun in his suitcase, but also photos from his childhood. Or by Jessica, the child-woman who seems to have stepped out of a Godard film, or by Olga, who is mauled by love and obedience like the homo politicus Hoederer himself.
These figures are strong and weak at the same time, rough and tender and therefore contradictory and have long since outgrown the monopoly of an ideological idea. Just as the thesis itself eventually dissolves in this insane story about crimes and broken promises, about misunderstandings, disappointments, betrayal and love, as only theater can tell.
