The Laurenz Foundation, Schaulager presents the guest performance Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) at the Schauspielhaus (Theater Basel) on five successive evenings during Art Basel week, from Wednesday, June 17, to Sunday June 21. In this production, Christoph Marthaler brings texts by the German-Swiss artist Dieter Roth (1930–1998) to life in a pharmacy setting, where they touch the heart, kidneys, stomach, and intestines - even the tear ducts are affected, as Roth wrote what he called a “sea of tears.” Now, in a decidedly unsentimental manner, five fabulous pharmacists and a wondrous customer base in this sea. The prescription they write for life is a poem.

Das Weinen (Das Wähnen)
Based on texts by Dieter Roth
Directed by Christoph Marthaler

Guest performance Schauspielhaus Zurich | Weiterspielen

Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) is not a play. It’s a sea of tears. More precisely, Sea of Tears 4. Whether or not this is a generic name cannot be definitively settled. The only certainty: there are five seas of tears plus one lake of tears, all written by Dieter Roth.

When we speak of Dieter Roth (1930–1998), it is almost always in reference to the visual artist Dieter Roth, who was born in Hanover, raised in Switzerland, and lived in Hamburg, Iceland, the USA, and Basel. His was a unique oeuvre: paintings, objects, films, drawings, assemblages, installations, compositions, artists’ books – or, to be more precise, chocolate sculptures, spice pictures, Bunnydropping-bunnies, table ruins, lion towers, and literature sausages.

However, Dieter Roth’s literary and poetic work has been (and continues to be) overlooked. It is also, physically speaking, very difficult to access. While the anthology published by Suhrkamp is long out of print, as is the one by Luchterhand, other publications may be found at high prices in antiquarian bookshops, and a mere few texts are circulating on the Internet. This is a shame, as writing meant a great deal to Dieter Roth. Time and again he went on record that it was his real passion.

It is this passion that is the subject of Das Weinen (Das Wähnen), as is Christoph Marthaler’s passion for Dieter Roth’s passion, and the side effects and interactions that arise when it is a sea of tears rather than a play at hand.

Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) is not an evening about Dieter Roth. There is no shred of biography nor of anecdotes, and not even the slightest reference to those moments when Christoph Marthaler and Dieter Roth crossed paths every now and then in Basel in the 1990s. Not a word about the fact that Marthaler received Das Weinen (Das Wähnen), Volume 2A (Sea of Tears 4) as a gift from Roth, and has been carrying it from city to city for many years. Nor could the setting in Marthaler’s production be associated with Roth’s works of visual art. Nothing of the sort. Marthaler’s production of Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) is about the language of Dieter Roth. And the question of how this language could be spoken. And when. And by whom. And under what circumstances.

Roth himself once described his book Das Weinen (Das Wähnen), Volume 2A (Sea of Tears 4) as a “speech text.” This is not surprising, as Roth has an infinite number of speakers appear. Often they exist only for short moments, and sometimes only for one sentence. The speakers then take on character names, like this example:

Whoever
Eggs
Hindberg
FISH
Comeinafterall
Onefeelingdizzy 1 and Onefeelingdizzy 2

Choirs also feature in Roth’s work (A+B+ C+D+E+F+ G+H), as do curtains and forecurtains, iron hats, ice cream, and pigs named Bob. How is one to react to such specifications? Is it necessary to have 450 costumes and at least as many scene changes? Christoph Marthaler has decided otherwise. His production of Das Weinen (Das Wähnen) is set in (more or less) everyday life, where despair and hope lie so close together that they almost form a single entity, something like: desperhope. Is it possible to depict such a thing? Dieter Roth might have answered this question thusly: “As soon as you represent something, it disappears in the representation. The universal symbol for representation is the magic hood of invisibility.”