The Most Beautiful Gift
What is the most beautiful gift you have ever received? And what is the worst one? How would you classify your life in this light? The Viennese staging of The Earthquake Concert presents the issue of human life, which is God´s gift, but the worst man could have received from the Lord. Lots of problems, or inner demons, accompany human existence since its origins. How to shake them off? And how to cure all that for ever and live a life without those inner earthquakes?
There are many ways of interpreting this play. The poorly visible captions however move its interpretations to supra-interpretational heights. A simply furnished mental hospital, a triplet, maybe a quadruplet of actors, and lots of traumas not ever voiced and listened to. What or who is the cure? Is it music with its liberating effects on the patients? Is it the God himself? Or is it the woman that observes her patients tacitly like the Supreme Being?
The original version of the staging worked with a much larger cast, but the lady director, Ira Süssenbach, restricted it a lot, dividing all traumas of the world among the three main characters, who reveal their/our traumas in front of the audience and the fourth actor on stage. In a metal cage, the actors transform themselves not only to baroque or biblical figures, but even to dogs of various natures. Through these delirious states, the spectators learn about their problems, finding out that even though the world keeps changing, the problems of its inhabitants remain the same. Maybe only much worse.
