Das Weinen (Das Wähnen)

In Christoph Marthaler’s pharmacy, medicines rebel and sneak out of their drawers. White scrubs got the blues. Warnings and side effects are in order. The new piece by the Swiss director is an ode to nail mycosis, a soap-opera of the bowels.

Jesus carrying his cross. But not any cross. This one is pharmacy-green and flashes to the pulsing beat of an invisible heart. In the shop the pharmacists drink to the disarrayed medicines and the imaginary patients over funeral march tunes. Marthaler didn’t take inspiration from the pandemic but from a side effect caused by an antibiotic that was supposed to fix another pain. “There are no effects, there are only side effects”, he mused and recalled the artistic gestures and shenanigans of his friend Dieter Roth, a sculptor-poet whose idiosyncratic and ever-evolving work wavered between provocation and awakening. Roth gave Marthaler a copy of his book Das Weinen (Das Wähnen). Marthaler has consistently cherry-picked miscellaneous elements for his works. Roth writes: “Nothing is more important than writing or rather ruminating. Making up sentences”. Roth’s ephemeral view of art and matter is mirrored in the magical staging of Marthaler, a keen observer of this world’s abyssal vacuity and nonsense. Beneath the biting humor lies the melody of melancholy.