Lenz

LENZ
after Georg Büchner
A production of the Rottstr 5 Theater

By and with
Linus Ebner

Text version
Linus Ebner, Jasmina Dittrich, Simon Krämer, Victoria Fritz

Assistance
Jasmina Dittrich, Victoria Fritz

Lighting
Simon Krämer

photos
Yuryi Ogarkov

production
Hans Dreher, Oliver Paolo Thomas

Duration: approx. 70 minutes

"Lenz walked through the mountains on the 20th..."
More than 170 years ago, Büchner wrote his famous prose text "Lenz", which is about the confused writer Jakob Lenz,
and how he seeks spiritual refuge in the mountain village of Waldbach.
In the wintry village, he tries to escape his intense anxiety in a variety of ways.
Lenz also repeatedly searches for metaphysical support in art and literature: Shakespeare, Goethe, The Bible. Whether he also
reading Büchner's Lenz have helped him?
After all, the narrative text is considered a milestone in German literature. People have been arguing about this text ever since it was written. Is it
a fragment, a novella, even a plagiarism? And how to penetrate it? It is attempted with Reclam notebooks at grammar school, at university,
at all the theaters in the Republic and now under the rancid ex-Nokia railroad arch at Rottstr. 5. Here, too, it all began with a yellow booklet.

Press reviews

As if madness were chasing behind him on horses - that's how rushed Linus
Ebner plays this Lenz in his own scenic arrangement: he jumps over the
over the cord of the microphone that acoustically amplifies his words from time to time
and the madness seems to look out of his eyes. Ebner
plays expressively, with the courage to be ugly, occasionally also to be
silliness - but also full of beauty and charisma. With great
Büchner's eloquent descriptions of nature with great suggestive power,
describes the protagonist's auto-aggressive spurts, his anxiety
anxiety disorders and panic attacks. A swing, on which Ebner gyrates again and again
again and again does not serve the purpose of relaxation, but rather
as a metaphor for the swaying of the world that the poet feels at the beginning of
of his schizophrenia.

The viewer will certainly not be bored by this perfectly
evening, which oscillates perfectly between tempo and thoughtfulness and
only minor cuts, sticks closely to Büchner's original text and yet
and yet you can feel how the world and the staging gradually transform into
gradually transform into hieroglyphs. "Can't you hear the terrible voice?
that screams around the entire horizon and is usually called the silence?
called silence?" asks the desperate Lenz to the kind Oberlin before he
brings him to Strasbourg. There he lives in his emptiness.
We hear the final sentence of this production with dismay before we applaud for a long time.
applaud for a long time.

Pure theater

Ebner not only worked on the text version and cleverly edited and deleted it
and cut, but is also responsible for the direction. He
recites in a way that does justice to the beauty of the language
and at the same time finds wonderfully abstruse images to stage the events of the novella.
the events of the novella. Ebner becomes Jakob Michael Reinhold
Lenz, who served as Büchner's model.

Lenz suffered from paranoid schizophrenia and Büchner, as a doctor, was interested in everything pathological.
interested in everything pathological, describes the phase of his life in which
the illness shows its terrible face for the first time. But Ebner
does not turn it into a theater of consternation. On the contrary, alongside quiet and
oppressive moments, he has many funny ideas to illustrate Lenz's outbursts
between madness and deepest depression. And so this
evening becomes a hilarious and imaginative psychogram. At the end
At the end, you leave the theater happy. Linus Ebner is one of the
really good ones, and we can look forward to his future projects.

WAZ