Toscana therapy
| Data | |
|---|---|
| Title: | Toscana therapy |
| Genus: | play |
| Original language: | German |
| Author: | Robert Gernhardt |
| Publishing year: | 1986 |
| Premiere: | March 7, 1987 |
| Place of premiere: | Stadttheater Aachen (Director: Norbert Hilchenbach ) |
| Place and time of the action: | Location: A terrace in front of a former Tuscan farmhouse that has been carefully converted into a summer house. The action starts Friday evening and ends Sunday morning. It takes place in mid-July, in the first half of the 1980s. |
| people | |
|
|
The Toscana therapy is the only play of the German poet Robert Gernhardt .
The piece was written in 1986 and premiered in Aachen in March 1987 . The playing time is about 100 minutes.
content
Karin and Gerhard, a pedantic, a bit dusty academic couple around forty, like every year, go on vacation in the holiday home of their therapist Dieter, who is their friend, in Tuscany. The only condition from Dieter's side: You are not allowed to receive any guests in his house. However, the couple do not manage to drive away the brazen American writer and bon vivant Victor, who has stayed with them. When the editor Bergmann and cement sack photographer Florian and his funky companion Silvia appear later, the chaos is perfect - and Karin and Gerhard with their nerves at the end. Communication between everyone involved goes wrong in every imaginable way, real encounters and clear expressions of will are almost as impossible as a successful joke - and yet happen again and again in a strange way.
construction
The piece is divided into 19 pictures, which should usually cover a period of five to ten minutes. Some pictures are played very quickly one after the other, others follow several hours apart. The concentration of the plot in little more than a day is already strongly reminiscent of a classic drama.
Gernhardt orients himself to a large extent on the modern, realistic theater. The viewer is not only taken into the action visually and acoustically in a variety of ways, but olfactory and haptic perception is also repeatedly addressed. At a crucial point, however, Gernhard contradicts this realistic approach. The behavior therapist Dieter appears in the style of a classic deus ex machina , the other guests in his presence remind of a choir of the ancient theater.
The pattern of the apocalypse offers an alternative reading : In the old aeon, decay and ruin prevail in all things, also in the relationship between Gerhard and Karin and in the Tuscan country house. The guests are tempters and confusioners - the angels of the apocalypse. In the end, Dieter appears as a savior and judge. The piece shows the new aeon of heavenly peace only in brief form. Like all other interpretations and emphases, this reading is adjusted again and again by opposing, constantly ironic elements and grounded on the basis of a cheerful reality.
Focus
The Toscana therapy can be read from different perspectives or staged with different focuses. Recurring basic patterns are mainly offered by the different varieties of communication and non-communication, the topic of gender image and role allocation, as well as the types of the joking, now imperceptibly bourgeoisie, and the naive-spontaneous would-be eco.
The Toscana is Gernhardt not only as the traditional yearning of the Central European intellectuals scene, combine perfectly where culture and landscape, history, crafts and modern way of life, but he countered it simultaneously and thus, the great questions of our time, from environmental degradation and Urban sprawl, the value of the aesthetic in art and the dubious alienation between body and mind, and the desperate search for self-realization.
As a social satire, the focus is on the meeting of extreme social stereotypes with their respective peculiarities, mostly caricatured in negative.
As a holiday comedy , the civilization clash of the German and Italian way of life takes center stage. It is then about the contrast between the Italianita, the lightness, looseness, naturalness that the main roles of the piece want to live, and a rigid, spiritualized artificiality in which they remain trapped and which brings spirit and matter out of their natural balance.
As a relationship drama , the focus is on the destruction or the clarification process of a marriage. The piece shows a relationship in crisis and shows how this relationship could be destroyed - or perhaps saved - by various internal and external factors. The questions asked also include the extent to which both spouses can or should give in to other seductive arts without harming themselves or the other. The limits of one's own loyalty and claim to loyalty are explored and the basis of trust as the foundation of the relationship is subjected to a mutual stress test.
As a communication piece, the piece demonstrates different patterns of interpersonal dealings: sought-after and spontaneous jokes, double-binding , attempts to distract and evade each other , talking past one another, surprise, irony, cynicism, escalation through to open argument. Examples in which communication methods work alternate in the piece with scenes in which communication is deliberately misled or inadvertently, unnoticed, fails.
Other reading styles start with friendship, which helps save relationships, or target the modern therapeutic approaches, which can use any remedy, however absurd.
Remarks
- ↑ Excerpts from the text of the piece
- ↑ In the first version of the piece, Karin is in her late forties