Germany
Theater director, scenographer. He directed the play "Quartet", which was shown as part of the II International Theatre Festival "Alexandrinsky" on the Main Stage on September 24 and 25, 2007.
Matthias Langhoff was born in 1941 in Zurich into a family of actors who had fled fascism. Upon his return to Berlin in 1945, his father took over the Deutsches Theater. Matthias Langhoff studied chemistry and worked as a bricklayer. In 1961 he joined the Berliner Ensemble, where he began a creative partnership with Manfred Karge that lasted more than 20 years. Another close friend and creative alter ego of the director was the writer and playwright Heiner Müller (productions of The Sheet, Prometheus, The Struggle, Tractor, Quartet, etc.).
Langhoff staged plays in the GDR and FRG, France and Spain, Italy and Burkina Faso. In 1989-1991 he directed the theater "Vidi Lozanne" in Switzerland.
Recently, he has been working extensively in France. The director of the National Theater of Brittany, Emmanuel de Vericourt, invited him to stage "Love Under the Elms" by Eugene O'Neill, "Richard III" by W. Shakespeare, "Revizor" by Nikolai Gogol and "Trojans" by Aeschylus. One of the latest premieres is a play by Argentine playwright Rodrigo Garcia at the Theatre des Amandiers.
Along with Hamlet Machine, Quartet is one of the most popular plays by H. Muller, which has become a classic of modern European theater.
This is a play that most favorably shades the virtuosity of the acting; its success depends entirely on the celebrity of the acting duo involved.
Müller died 10 years ago, and today - with general acquiescence - his texts are dying. They are being erased by the millstones of university redditors and the false profundity of literary congresses.
As is usually the case with classical texts, the theater considers it its duty to regularly incense them without bothering to search for meaning. It is amused by the fleeting effects of fashion, and does not notice how Müller's texts become decrepit, turning into sleeping pills.
Muller's "Quartet" deserves to be rediscovered: it is a wild, youthful play, endowed with devastating energy, brutally comic and utterly exhilarating. It is the perfect sequel to "Freken Julie": both texts unabashedly reveal the structure of the relationship between the sexes and seek to shatter illusions. Müller's characters - just like Strindberg's - are fragmentary, or - in Strindberg's words - assembled from scraps. The intimate sphere: love and sexual life - sprawls into a civil war, a battlefield. Both plays are written for the theater of looks, words, and contacts. The very skin of the actors becomes a screen for the projection of the drama. The rules of the play are determined by sexual desire. Madame de Merteuil and Valmont are warriors, as are Frecken Julie and her servant Jean. Their love is akin to power. The author's remark to Müller's play could be Hegel's phrase from The Phenomenology of Spirit: "The relationship between the two self-consciousnesses is constructed in such a way that each of them is defined in opposition to the other - in a struggle not for life, but for death" (...)
These texts contain something desperately cruel - like the truth itself. They break our favorite toys. They give us the negative energy we need. And help the theater regain its political significance. "We are looking for a breakdown in the development of events, ...a babble in the silence of the text, a gap in eternity, a mistake can become a deliverance" (H. Muller).
The action of "Quartet" unfolds not in the sphere of asbraces. Temporal and spatial parameters are clearly defined: "A secular salon of the times preceding the French Revolution / A bunker of the times after the Second World War". The spaces of private life are located in a time frame defined by the movement of history. This space and this time belong to the text and the play. "Quartet" does not join the chorus of voices saying goodbye to history. It lives history. It grows out of the estrangement of history marking the battle against fleeting time.
In Oshimi's masterpiece Empire of the Senses, there is a scene that is unrelated to the development of the protagonists' sexual struggle. A man is walking down the street - he has his head bowed low, disgust written on his face - as he passes a group of children shouting joyfully to greet the soldiers. The windows of all the houses are decorated with Japanese flags. Without this scene, the movie would have looked like a beautiful pornographic knock-off.
Matthias Langhoff