Die Beichte eines komischen Heiligen

Čechov’s theater has lost none of its worldwide fascination to this day. In the Soviet Union, many intellectuals lived with the characters of MÖWE or KIRSCHGARTEN for decades, even identified with them to a high degree. After the collapse of the communist system, familiar viewing habits and interpretations were increasingly questioned, and the complexity of the dramas was rediscovered. What remains controversial in the West as well as in the East is to what extent the undecidable ambivalences or the symbolic and/or absurd elements cancel out the realism of the dramas.

This is the point of departure for the collaboration between the video artist Isolde Loock and the literary scholar Wolfgang Stephan Kissel, which applies to the SCENIC MONOLOGUE IN ONE ACT entitled ABOUT THE DAMAGES OF TOBACCO: Can a video installation reveal something about Čechov that remains hidden or inaccessible to theatrical productions? The panic of the failed intellectual Nyukhin in front of his wife and daughters, his inability to control the tobacco addiction about which he gives a pseudo-scientific lecture, and his torn-off, sprawling life confession become the starting point of an intermedial reflection on self-perception and the perception of others.

According to one possible interpretation, the triumph of the failed (at the same time the triumph of Čechov’s art) consists in the cathartic-therapeutic speaking about his failure. Thus the last sentence of the monologue reads: “Dixi et animam levavi” (“I have spoken and lifted up my soul”). In view of the conclusion, however, it is also conceivable that Nyukhin continues to live in the usual way after the speech and accepts his fate. The outburst would then be a regularly repeating – inconsequential – event. The overall concept would be based on the principle of seriality, as tested by the avant-gardes in literature and music of the 20th century.

The artist translates this undecidable ambivalence of the original into the medium of the video installation. In doing so, she strips the one-act play of its theatrical aura and reduces it to a mercilessly probing gaze. By breaking this taboo, the monologue reveals a different character: it becomes the precursor of monomaniacal speaking without echo and thus joins the long line of obsessive self-exposures of modernity – up to the mostly inconsequential public confessions of our present.

“I have spoken and lifted up my soul” in deliquescent graffiti writing on the walls (sprayer: Michael Klauss) underscores the proximity to the serial confessions of our time in talk shows and therapy sessions.