A secret must remain a secret

Is there such a thing as love at first sight? Without a doubt. And certainly also: love of the theater. That's what happened when I experienced a Jan Lauwers production for the first time more than 20 years ago.

It was at the Vienna Impuls Festival in the summer of 2005, and it was his incomparable evening Isabella's Room. An artistically expansive evening that combined music and language, narrative and atmosphere, dance and video and left me speechless. What kind of evening had it been, into which you immersed yourself and came out a completely different person? That shimmered in strange colors, told and told? "The final applause: a single cry of bravo from the audience," I wrote down after the premiere, and it's no surprise that allies soon grouped around Lauwers. The later Burgtheater director Matthias Hartmann, for example, who repeatedly described the breath-taking power of Lauwers' theatrical language as formative. And Lauwers dramaturge Elke Janssens remembers to this day how audiences all over Europe queued for hours for performances as if they were at a pop concert.

Lauwers and his fabulous troupe of theater allies, called Needcompany, are constantly retelling the world we live in. They do this together because they believe in working together and it is part of Lauwers' talent to challenge the best in everyone. Needcompany, that means: I need company in order to be able to create. Once you have found this community, you sit together, formulate and find, try things out and let others inspire you. This results in something that could be Lauwers' favorite word, namely ambiguity. The figures you meet are like that, the space is like that, the approach to themes is like that. Anyone who enters one of the evenings with a square and graph paper will soon fail. Likewise, anyone who looks at the events through a precise good-evil template. Lauwers is adept at creating an associative space that you have to get involved in and in which you constantly find something new. Sometimes this can just be an impression or an intuition; sometimes it is difficult to describe exactly why you liked this or that. But - and this is the main thing - you leave the theater enriched.

What you'd better not wait for is a typical "director explains" play. Or, as Lauwers' assistant director Emily Hehl puts it: "No ideas are buried for the audience to dig up, and the prize is not guessing the leading team's train of thought." Rather: Everyone is allowed to come up with their own ideas.

Of course, Lauwers is deeply political. It is socio-political issues that move him; he is concerned with the world and what holds it together. Or, as we have to say: What no longer holds it together and what divides us. But he doesn't want to produce simple actionism theater that offers the simplest abbreviations. We are not served a simple mathematical equation on stage that comes ready to use: look, here a politician, there the corresponding theater character. That would be ... yes, exactly: too clear. No, it's about general phenomena, about the core of people, of society, and as we know, all of this can rarely be reduced to a lowest common denominator. And would then be used up too quickly. "Mystery must remain mystery", Doderer once wrote. The sentence could be from Lauwers.

Anyone who finds this too theoretical can rest assured: Although all this resonates, it is underpinned by a sense of enormous scenic impact. This can be a lavish, dazzling theatrical event, as in Ligeti's ludicrous opera Le Grand Macabre, in which Lauwers excelled in the art of exaggeration and opulence. But this can also be achieved with a minimum of action. Anyone who has seen it can testify to this: in L'incoronazione di Poppea, Lauwers captured time and space by having Kate Lindsey as Nerone traverse the stage predatorily and almost in slow motion, musically guided by the hit Pur ti miro. In the background: living images, Bruegel-like, in which the eye loses itself. His fourth state opera production - Lauwers also created Lee Miller in Hitler's Bathtub (music: Maarten Seghers) at NEST - is Mozart's La clemenza di Tito. An opera seria that he and his team dress in - of course! - ambiguous images. Film snippets, detailed work and brilliant costumes, a projected world of images framing a large, arena-like stage and a focus on the inner strength of the performers: Clemenza is not a Roman history play, but an examination of people and power. With the present day and with Mozart. With society - and above all with ourselves.