QUARTETT - Heiner Müller - Toneelhuis - Schauspielhaus Wien 2007
Photography © Koen Broos 2007
'Salon before the French Revolution/Bunker after World War III'. This is how Heiner Müller describes the setting of his play Quartet: Waiting for the guillotine lasts as long as waiting after the bomb.
The end time sets in.
Müller wrote this biting dialogue between Valmont and Merteuil as a contemporary version of Laclos' Les liaisons dangereuses. It became one of his most played texts.
Photography © Koen Broos 2007
Peter Missotten designed a small theater cube for about eighty spectators for Quartet. With two men floating above the heads of the audience. Like a loose spacecraft in the vacuum of history. The installation is a machine that produces loneliness and forces the actors into detachment, making the subcutaneous passion experienced as if from beneath a thick sheet of ice.
Photography © Koen Broos 2007
“Rarely have the formalism and aloofness of power, the coldness and loneliness of the two living dead been so impressively and so simply complex staged.”
Renate Klett, Theater Heute“Quartet is both an exciting role-playing game and a clash between giants. It is love at its grimest, biting down until it runs out and crushing others to entertain itself.” — De Standaard
Photography © Koen Broos 2007
Direction, stage, light and video design
PETER MISSOTTEN
Text
HEINER MÜLLER
Translation
MARTIN HARTKAMP
By
JONAS LEEMANS
KAREL TUYTSCHAEVER
Sound design
SENJAN JANSEN
Voices
KATELIJNE DAMEN
MIEKE DEGROOT
Production
TONEELHUIS & DE FILMFABRIEK
Coproduction
SCHAUSPIELHAUS WENEN
Photography © Koen Broos 2007
