The secretary of the round head.
At this year's Wuzhen Theatre Festival, Magic Mountain, produced by the Castle Theater in Vienna and directed by Bastian Kraft, took part in two performances. The play is based on the most important novel of the same name by the German writer Thomas Mann**.
The Magic Mountain has been staged many times, and this Kraft adaptation is faithful: it condenses nearly 1,000 pages of ** into a relatively short 130 minutes, retains almost all the important plots in the original book, and plays all the characters in the book with four actors with amazing creativity;The play also fully portrays the spiritual world of the protagonist Hans Kastolp, presenting his seven-year mental journey from being completely ignorant of the future of life, to being confused by family, friendship and love, to the chaotic inner state after receiving various political ideas, and finally to realizing that he must change and start acting. Waves after waves of characters clash and stir in Castorp's mind, forming not only an external panorama of pre-World War I European society, but also a very vivid and complex portrait of the youth spirit.
If the shock of this year's Wuzhen Theater Festival "Eurydice" comes from the silent interaction between people and the real environment, the shock of "Memories of Blas Kubas" comes from the combination of multiple spaces and texts, the shock of "Snow" comes from the quiet and mysterious atmosphere and poetic theatrical presentation, the shock of "The Window in the Middle of the Spaceship" comes from the in-depth dismantling of specific concepts, and the shock of "Fairy Tale Legend" comes from the actors' extremely strong stage expression, then "Magic Mountain" It is undoubtedly the most complex, profound and compact stage form of all these works in Chinese. This is due on the one hand to Thomas Mann, but also to the Kraft team's thorough understanding of the original book and its meticulous theatrical approach.
At the heart of this adaptation is a giant "magic mountain" on the stage, a stage installation that occupies the entire stage space (both horizontally and vertically). There are several narrow, rugged "mountain roads" on the Magic Mountain for the actors to move around;In addition to the light-colored, epochal patterns, the entire beige mountain is also divided into several polygonal planes. Over the course of the performance, these planes become projection screens, presenting faces of different sizes in a de-perspective and somewhat cubist way. Four actors climb the mountain and engage in dialogue with pre-recorded footage and other characters played by the same four people.
Interestingly, multiple actors play the same protagonist Castorp at the same time. This technique is also used in the Berlin Theatertreffen's "Most Notable Plays" "New Life: Where Are We Going". The two men and two women cast and the gender reversal between the actors and the characters hint at the vague gender notions that Thomas Mann hides in "The Magic Mountain", and also reflect the director's own efforts to balance gender. For Kraft, when the same actress plays Setambrini and Nafta, we see not only two historical men in dialogue, but also a female role and body to understand these dialogues – meaning that "women's voices and minds also provide important intellectual discourse". In this way, the creators empowered women and gave "Magic Mountain" a new meaning of the times.
Although individual viewers were captivated by the huge projection faces, it is undeniable that the Kraft version of "The Magic Mountain" is still a work that relies heavily on the actors' bodies. It calls for the presence of the body, for the simultaneous presence of the actors and the audience, for everyone present to feel the passage of time and the slight aging of the body – all the actors and the audience silently wait for the mercury column to rise when Castorp takes his body for the first time. Although Kraft said in the interview that this time is not as long as the actual seven minutes, three or four minutes still seems long, precious and sacred. It seems to ask us how human beings in the post-pandemic era should re-consume their time and how to view their own mortal fateHow should we perceive changes in our bodies, and to what extent can life be perceived by us?
In the end, the theater becomes a material field, which also brings material thinking. It refuses to let us look through the illusory black mirror. Here, we have to **, to listen, to feel, to wait, to be present at the same time as the actors and that huge snowy peak. Because in a way, man is material, and human life is a carnival of matter.
Interview with Bastian Kraft, director of "The Magic Mountain".
People eventually die, and this is often forgotten.
Invent your own way of telling your own story.
Beiqing Art Review: Why did you choose "Magic Mountain" for adaptation, and what is the origin?What appealed to you most about this great feature?
Kraft: I've always admired this work and thought a lot about how to bring it to the theater. I think the core of the story is about the inevitability of having to face death – something that is often denied and forgotten by us in modern society, and death doesn't always come in our daily lives. Faced with the fact that our lives will end sooner or later, we change our perspective on life itself. I think it's very interesting to think about this in the theater: because in the theater we are physically together, and during the time of the performance, we have experienced a little aging together.
Beijing Youth Art Review: "Magic Mountain" has been put on stage by creators all over the world, from your point of view, what is the most difficult part of the adaptation process?
Kraft: I'm a big fan of adapting plays because every time you have to invent your own way of telling a story. Of course, you need to do a lot of work to cut down the complexity and decide which parts you want to extract and emphasize, but the process has been very rewarding for me. This ** provides too much material and is full of endless treasures for the stage.
The whole mountain is Kastorp's brain.
Beiqing Art Review: Why do you want to realize this "Magic Mountain" through images?How did you come up with the idea of stage art?
Kraft: The idea behind the image came from making the whole story a memory for Castorp, or like one of his dreams, which he recreated in his own mind. The other characters are like voices in his head. The whole mountain is his brain, and it houses everyone, which is why they are played by the same people. I chose four actors and asked them to play the different voices in Hans Kastolp's head, and the whole performance was like a monologue.
The idea of this rockery as you see it was there from the beginning. We need different planes to present the image of **, but also to use the whole mountain as a larger, complete screen. The bright surface also makes the mountain itself an image, a screen that projects thoughts and dreams.
Beiqing Art Review: The gender between actors and characters is often reversed, for example, a female actor plays Settambrini and Nafta, a male actor plays Mrs. Xiao Xia, and so on. What is the intention of this gender reversal?
Kraft: Mrs. Chaucia reminds me of Castorp's friend Hippe, and this man may have been his first love. Therefore, when it comes to Castorp's love interest, their gender is very ambiguous. Madame Shaw has a masculine quality, and Hippe has a feminine aspect. In Thomas Mann's work, gender is often very ambiguous. I hope that this aspect can be emphasized.
What makes me a little frustrated is that all the interesting opinions in ** are spoken by men (mostly Setambrini and Nafta), as if women don't think. By having women and their voices as part of the Magic Mountain Universe, I hope to make this male-dominated world a little more balanced and make people realize that women's voices and minds also provide important intellectual discourse.
Make every moment feel like it's the first time it happened.
Beiqing Art Review: How do the actors' live performances and projected images cooperate, and how to achieve emotional transmission and seamless dialogue?
Kraft: Of course, there's a lot of technical involved, but at the end of the day, it's all about the realization of the scene, the actors creating the scene and the dialogue at the moment of the performance. For me, this is the ultimate art of performance: making every moment meaningful, making every moment feel like it happened for the first time, even if everything has been rehearsed and repeated hundreds of times.
Beiqing Art Review: When Kastolp took his temperature for the first time after going up the mountain, the theater was empty for a long time, what kind of effect did you expect?Is this really seven minutes?
Kraft: The timing of the temperature taken in the performance is at the hands of an actress who estimates the duration of the scene and decides when to let it end. Most of the time, this scene lasts three to four minutes.
In this work, the theme of time is closely related to the theme of death. Time itself is never-ending and eternal, but for us humans, time on Earth is very limited. Our clocks are always ticking, and every second brings us closer and closer to death.
The same is true for the duration of theatrical performances: together we as spectators are getting closer and closer to death. In this sense, time is a precious gift, but there are no rules available for how we should use it.
What is a "reasonable" use of time?What is a "wasted" time?There are no answers to any of these, just as there are no answers to the question "What is the meaning of life?" These questions are raised and the protagonist is made to realize, as well as the reader and viewer, that time is the very elusive and mysterious basis of life itself.