STEINERNE GÄSTE

Oliver Zahn tells of the toppled statues of colonial masters and generals, about Lenin’s head and the eagle at the entrance to Tempelhof airport. They are cut up, buried, dug up again, smelted down, misappropriated as building materials, hidden and, not infrequently, put back up again. What happens to monuments after they have fallen reveals a great deal about the societies that wish to dispose of them – and often produces unintended metaphors that are absurdly comical.

The initial idea for the production came from Mozart’s ‘Don Giovanni’, whose music is repeatedly heard here. In the opera, the eponymous hero is stalked by the statue of a man that he murdered. Is the ghost real or a manic projection on the part of the perpetrator? In the theatre, stage fog rolls across the empty plinth. Who or what do we believe we can see in these elusive forms? What is clear is that the ghost will not be gone as long as the plinth is standing.