MEDIATHEK

Ajax / Qu’on me donne un ennemi encompasses several works by the German dramatist Heiner Müller. Ajax par exemple is a poem written 5 years after the fall of the Berlin wall, a month when Müller, who was suffering from cancer, underwent critical surgery. Initially published in a major German newspaper, Ajax par exemple is a long poem (169 lines) or a long monologue – the two forms being virtually indistinguishable. A writer, who wants to write a tragedy, is affected by what he can see from his hotel room: the east side of a Berlin reassembled. The poem looks like a mix of the writer’s memories and pieces of Sophocle’s Ajax. With the 2nd monologue, La liberation de Prométhée, the global issues of these texts are evoking the chaotic dimension of European societies and the political thought.

The poem pursues a winding yet discontinuous path, and its content is both colloquial and erudite. A portrait of the artist gradually takes shape, alternately humorous and serious: the artist overwhelmed by taxes, his quarrels with other directors (Peter Zadek) and the cost of medical care (the money he had earned from a literary award was all spent on dentists); the artist cut off from the general public that prefers bestsellers, television and action flicks to tragedies, and that equates Ajax with detergent; the artist mourning the political “innocence” of his youth and seeking for his place amid the new configurations where he now finds himself : reunified Germany and Europe.

The show provides these works with the offbeat setting of music theater. Continuously going between what is said and what is played, the performers reveal all the power of a partition contained in an intense and electrical movement of 50 minutes. Sylvain Cartigny, Lazare Boghossian and Mathieu Bauer distill their music, steering stage codes toward the realms of live performance, giving us a very wide range of sounds and emotions, and turning André Wilms into a rock star who embodies the role of “transmitter of the rowdiest poetry”.