“Thus Spoke Zarathustra” for the stage: First the suffering, then the pleasure

Life is a challenge! One has to feel sorry for the human being, given all the hardships they are exposed to. They are born in agony to a suffering mother. And barely has they seen the light of day when their eyes burn, hunger sets in, gravity, fatigue, heat, cold, fear, the noise of others, and gnawing self-doubt. So what's the point of all this drama, you might think? What's the point?

Such questions also arise on Saturday evening at Zurich's Schiffbau, where Friedrich Nietzsche's classic "Thus Spoke Zarathustra" premieres in a production by German director Sebastian Hartmann. Hartmann has an affinity for unusual dimensions. In the Schiffbau, he doesn't set the stage across the space. Rather, he divides it along its longitudinal axis into the audience gallery on one side and a long path for the actors' entrances on the other. At the rear, however, this path is enclosed by new walls that together form a gigantic screen. On the floor, there are cannonades of video projectors on both sides, initially providing a dim light.

The first human child to step into this twilight is a naked woman (Tabita Johannes). And as she immediately twists and turns in pain, twitching as she defends herself against the existence into which she has been thrown without being asked, one is reminded of a baby crying as soon as it is born; it will have to learn to laugh first. A similar dynamic, to anticipate, also dominates this four-and-a-half-hour evening of theater.

There's something truly fascinating about Hartmann's courage to embrace grandeur. But physics doesn't care. It takes revenge on the direction, which failed to take sufficient account of the hall's conditions, with a constant reverberation that sometimes makes it difficult to understand the text, sometimes prevents it. As a result, the audience stares wide-eyed and pulls long faces.

In front of them, actors walk back and forth as if on the road of life. In their black and white textiles, they recall the grayness of everyday life and the black or white cars in traffic. The fact that the road is straight is clearly their fault. For, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra repeatedly says: All truth is crooked.

Perhaps that's why the nine actors now appear before the audience, mostly individually, in a monologue, wailing, howling, and screaming incessantly as they express their unhappiness. It's hard to understand them. What are they suffering from? Aha, they, too, are evidently suffering from the hardships of life: from hunger, from gravity or fatigue, from the heat and the cold, from the fear of loneliness, from the noise of their fellow human beings, but above all from self-doubt. So what's the point of all this, they ask themselves. What's the point of all this theater?

Sometimes the monologues are shown only as videos. This applies, for example, to the self (Ingolf Müller-Beck), who receives a phone call. From whom? From the self! At one point, an actor (Matthias Neukirch) seems to be asking his colleagues in the dressing room for help because he no longer knows when it's his turn to deliver his lines. That could be funny, but it remains a constant struggle. "Be quiet, for once," a colleague barks at him. And the audience wants to agree: Be quiet, for once, stop shouting!

Certainly, the pathos and despair are indebted to Nietzsche's text. Although it's not mentioned in the production, in Nietzsche's work, Zarathustra spent ten years in the mountains for inner contemplation. Through his meditations, he believes he has found a way to escape from the grayness of a bourgeois, staid life into freedom and orgiastic bliss. In the mountains, he also discovered the eternal recurrence of the same. Because his contemporaries refuse to listen to him, he is thrown back on his miserable, solitary humanity.

Some passages from Zarathustra's monologues are edited into loops and then recited by different voices. The actors often seem like text slaves, drugged with screaming and complaining pills. Artemis Chalkidou provides the first exception in a witty scene in which Zarathustra criticizes everyday life in the big city. Here, slow suicide is called life; and every great idea is belittled. While the philosopher speaks wisely, a microphone is held up to his mouth, amplifying his own thoughts and transforming them into Mickey Mouse speech.

After two hours, a kind of intermission. Zarathustra has finally proclaimed how humanity can find its way out of its misery: through dance and art. Techno (music by Samuel Wiese) is immediately pumped into the hall, allowing the ensemble and audience to loosen up with a short rave. The bar in the foyer is also available for refreshments.

Returning to the hall a good quarter of an hour later, one sees empty rows. About a quarter of the audience has stayed away, missing an art happening in which the production continues its leisurely continuation. A huge screen stands in the room, in front of it two ladders, on which some actors-painters in black overalls are crawling around, while others are mixing the paint.

The paint is poured in trickles over the surface on both sides. It will take almost an hour until the entire painting is marked with red, blue, black, and yellow traces. During this time, a cheerful mood prevails among the spectators. They watch the artists, who are somewhat reminiscent of the workers who once toiled in this workshop. Others chat quietly with one another.

But those who are lonely will probably be bored and once again ask themselves what the meaning is. The picture is finally completed with action painting: The artists each pour a cask of paint over the canvas; it also splashes onto the floor and into the audience. So what could be the meaning? It's hard to say. After all, a colorful work was created – not by a brilliant artist, but by a dedicated team.

But the Nietzsche production reaches its climax in individual performances in the final part. First, a fascinating rebirth: Tabita appears to Johannes once again as a naked human child. Twisting and turning in the earth (or rather, the brown paint), she gradually grows out of the ground. Accompanied by shrill squeals, her convulsions seem to express both pain and pleasure.

But the climax comes courtesy of Elias Arens, who suddenly translates Nietzsche's text into a speech fueled by madness and enthusiasm, yet entirely understandable. In his ten-minute furioso, he becomes Nietzsche himself, who, liberated from God and reason, now pursues freedom in madness. And when, finally, just before twelve o'clock, Linda Pöppel also impresses as Zarathustra, who in her portrayal gradually finds his way out of melancholy and loneliness to comfort the audience with hope for love and tenderness, one feels reconciled. There are a few beautiful moments in this Nietzsche performance, but overall one experiences an unusual spectacle. Why does everyone have to scream so much at the beginning? Uncomfortable.