Max Black

"This evening at the theatre dramatises the mechanics of human wisdom but kindly requests the audience to leave its sense of reason in the foyer."

- 24 HEURES

The actor André Wilms is at the centre of Heiner Goebbels’ musical theatre works, including his 1993 piece Ou bien le débarquement désastreux. En cierta manera, Max Black comienza donde terminara Ou bien le débarquement désastreux. (The Hapless Landing).

Max Black starts where Où bien le débarquement désastreux finished. Now that the lights have been turned off and the musicians have gone, what remains in Max Black is a researcher alone in his laboratory - biologist, physician, chemist, mathematician, or maybe linguist?
"The suspense of the production doesn't generate a story - just a question: What happens now?" That was the conclusion of Swiss daily newspaper, Der Blick, after the premiere of Max Black in 1998. The innovative lighting design in Max Black places controlled flames on stage via reflection instead of projectors, creating an effect which is unexpected and surprising.

The music - the sounds and noises - are produced and triggered by the actor. The stage becomes a laboratory of ideas which the spectator can follow through fuses which, once lit, trigger chain reactions. Using a sampler, André Wilms reproduces his own previously recorded sounds. The sound of a pot becomes a rhythm which forms the basis of the next scene’s composition. But the rhythm gets stopped immediately because sparks fly out of an old radio. And so it goes on.

The audience sees the actor trying to measure the immeasurable and tries to help him solve his enigma. The language becomes music in a poetic way, dissolving into abstraction. On the other hand, each sound can be transformed into music and everything fits perfectly into place. Max Black is in contrast to Ou bien le débarquement désastreux, where the musicians were the performers and the production of the music provided the basic structure of the production. For this production, everything that the actor does is transformed into light (fire), image (action) and music (sound).

Heiner Goebbels has forged a masterful theatrical skill, including his sublime instrumental technique, developing a highly personal discourse where seemingly incompatible musical styles converge. Here, his composition draws on works in both French and English by Paul Valéry, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Max Black. This production premiered on April 21, 1998, in Lausanne, Switzerland and was subsequently performed at the Teatro Nacional de Cataluña in 1999 and in the 2002 edition of the Festival de Otoño.

 

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