Castle premiere

How “Toto” remains human in the hell of the world

Maria Happel shines in "Toto" at the castle(Bild: Burgtheater/© Tommy Hetzel)

The German writer Sibylle Berg has dramatized her 12-year-old novel "Toto oder Vielen Dank für das Leben" for the Vienna Burgtheater. Maria Happel touches in the midst of a good ensemble.

The fact that it is a "world premiere" seems a little generous, as Sibylle Berg's successful novel "Toto oder vielen Dank für das Leben" is 12 years old. But at least the author did the dramatization herself. And while in 2012 we were still dealing with a picturesquely tragic individual case, today the performance is in the zeitgeist of the never-ending diversity debates. GDR, 1966: An illegitimate child of unidentifiable gender is born into the boundless philistinism of the workers' and farmers' paradise. He goes through the hell of a children's home and a foster family, arrives in the West and experiences the worst of the downfalls there too, but with his depth of soul and guileless beauty of heart remains a human being in the midst of a world full of traitors.

Maria Happel, Bruno Cathomas(Bild: Burgtheater/© Tommy Hetzel)

Daniel Jesch, Bruno Cathomas, Maria Happel, Alexandra Henkel(Bild: Burgtheater/© Tommy Hetzel)

Annamária Láng, Markus Scheumann, Daniel Jesch, Alexandra Henkel, Bruno Cathomas, Maria Happel(Bild: Burgtheater/© Tommy Hetzel)

As his own stage designer, Burgtheater debutant Ersan Mondtag likes to rely on the Cinemascope format. Here, he coherently stages a kind of didactic play in Brecht-Eisler aesthetics, convincingly composed by Beni Brachtel. In the midst of schematic figures, Maria Happel plays a wondrous creature of pain in the shape of a shapeless cocoon in which a fairy is trapped. The rest of the ensemble around Bruno Cathomas also leaves nothing to be desired. Unfortunately, the annoying live camera is used at the end, and the pedagogical spelling out of the woken catalog stretches the evening, which has been followed with sympathy up to that point, to excessive length.