This man whom fate strikes, who loses his fear of God for a short time and in the end regains it all the more strongly – yes, is it even a good ending? We’ll see. His name is Mendel Singer. This is how Joseph Roth, the main character of his novel “Job”, first published as a serial novel in the “Frankfurter Zeitung” in 1930, called him. Now Job, alias Mendel, is coming to the stage of Schauspiels Frankfurt. But for director Johanna Wehner, who has written and is now directing her own version of Mendel’s wanderings through Russia and America, through suffering and loss, the Roth job by the name of Mendel is only called M.
Eva-Maria Magel Senior Cultural Editor Rhein-Main-Zeitung. I’m following
M like Matthias. Matthias Redlhammer, who will gradually become Mendel in the polyphonic canon of sentences and stories, and first of all, like his fellow players Caroline Dietrich, Heidi Ecks, Stefan Graf, Agnes Kammerer, Nils Kreutinger and Christoph Pütthoff, consists only of the letters of his own first name. And from sentences that Wehner has almost all taken from the original text of the novel. But these, as if wandering through space, from the bodies of the actors become a polyphony that seems very contemporary.
An undramatic person
“It ends in a suction. I hope that there will be,” says Redlhammer. To give plasticity to the thoughts, to give flesh to the words on stage – that is, after all, the reason why the “Job” is now being played. Otherwise, says Redlhammer with a very small smile, you could just distribute the book among the audience. Redlhammer is not one to speak in the breast tone of conviction. Who carefully weighs and thinks about what and how he formulates. And with quiet self-irony he thinks that he is thinking – but whether something will come out of it, is doubtful.
It’s not a role that you can slip into, which he now plays. But work on a text that is not easy to acquire and can drive you even after the rehearsals. How does one endure what happens to this Mendel, where does doubt set in for such a believing person? Matthias Redlhammer also uses a word that is associated with “Job” when he provides information about his career: “fate”. However, in a completely undramatic way. How he doesn’t tend to make a fuss at all.
