“Lenz in hopeless madness.
(…) At 30 years old, Rainer uses Büchner’s text as a starting point. In the Büchner setting, she aims to make visible the total drama of this restless life. She does so by depicting an eternal conflict between a frantic struggle and a massive, rigid societal system.
To achieve this, she incorporates historical material, such as original quotes from Oberlin’s sermons. The result is a finely crafted evening of theater, employing subtle means and an enchanting soundtrack, which strives not to take sides but reveals a certain affection for Lenz. However, there is no good ending to tell about him. Lenz will die, lonely in a May night in Moscow. Illustrative of this path to nothingness, Rainer focuses on Lenz’s time with Oberlin, where she allows him to wrestle with a possibly healing belief in a firmly established divine order and his drive for self-determination, his self-destructive madness included.
In the end, the respectable family has sent him away (or did he leave on his own?), tidying up what was devastated, he lies on the stage floor, dead, lost, forgotten. This is how he lay there when the audience entered the hall. Amidst this portrayal, Markus Meyer brings him to life, gently and tumultuously. Opposite him is Manfred Böll as Oberlin, whose severity and fervor of faith, along with his family’s submissiveness, sometimes come across as rather stiff.
Rainer shows – calmly, but impressively and finely composed – a life breaking apart because it is difficult, if not impossible, for wanderers in search of a home for themselves to find a place.
For this, there was long and vigorous applause.”