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„Kada ste poslednji put videli glumca da place a da ne deluje Sentimentalno nego prosto žilavo?" Spiegelonline "Jürgen Gosch is German theatre's most anti-melodramatic director. He sobers up the play until all of the banging and clanging, and sentimental sighs have vanished. His productions are theory-free zones, purely acting with nothing to prove. That's why they always appear to come into being at the very moment they're performed. This lends even his weaker works a nice, unneurotic levity. In the best cases, though, this produces something rare: truth. Gosch's Uncle Vanya at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin is such a production. Here Chekhov's characters are no elegiac Russian theatre-types, but rather irritable, nervous people who have wound up in the cramped, windowless, doorless crate that is Johannes Schütz's set. [..,] In this staging, nothing comes as naturally as misfortune. For exam pie, it's the young Elena's bad fortune to have married an old man and in the meantime to have learned that what she once thought was love was simply a mistake. Constanze Becker turns this Elena into a creature of luxury, one who only has to stride slowly across the stage to turn all the men's heads. Then she leans back against a wall, tired and worn out by the emptiness of her life, while one of her admirers flounders around in front of her. Her admirer, Astrov the doctor (played by Jens Harzer), is a laughing stock-and that's not just because of his grotesquely large moustache, his reeking of vodka and his endless monologues. It's because pretty much every man looks like a poor devil beside this woman. [...] What he's attracted to is Elena's beauty. What he wants from her is a dirty little date in his cabin in the woods, however nothing ever comes of it. But if the doctor's got it bad, the embittered Vanya has it even worse. Together with his niece, played by Meike Droste, he manages the estate of his long-dead sister. [...] Ulrich Matthes performs this tragedy of a life unlived as a powerful portrait study of man in despair. The way Matthes delves into his character's unhappiness, from the moments of sad longing right through to his illusion-free moment of reckoning is frighteningly realistic." Süddeutsche Zeitung "When was the last time you saw an actor cry without appearing sentimental, but instead simply tough as nails?" Spiegelonline