The new theater season in Berlin has opened under a cloud of uncertainty, amid a proposal to drastically cut the city’s cultural budget that has raised alarm and drawn criticism. Against this gloomy backdrop, the Schaubühne playhouse’s decision to open its season with a five-hour-long world premiere by an internationally acclaimed director felt defiant.
Robert Lepage’s “Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe” (“Faith, Money, War and Love”), which premiered in early October, is an ambitious work that strives, and occasionally achieves, epic sweep and emotional impact during its mammoth running time.
It all started with a deck of cards.
Lepage, a polymathic Canadian director whose credits include films, Cirque du Soleil spectacles and the Metropolitan Opera’s divisive Ring cycle, devised “Glaube, Geld, Krieg and Liebe” with seven Schaubühne actors, who were initially guided by chance: they used a deck of playing cards to help generate characters and situations.
“Cards are charged with meaning, symbolism and themes,” Lepage, who has used a similar technique in previous productions, states in the program. The director matched each suit to a theme and encouraged his performers to use the numerical and metaphorical value of the cards to brainstorm and improvise.
The result of all this shuffling and play is an expansive melodrama about Germany since the end of World War II. Divided into four acts, or episodes, “Glaube, Geld, Krieg and Liebe” whisks us from Wiesbaden in 1945 to Ukraine in 2022. That’s a lot a ground to cover, and the script boasts more characters than there are cards in a deck; geographic, linguistic and temporal shifts are frequent.
In the first and best act, a baby is left on a convent’s doorstep shortly after World War II. Raised by the nuns, who name her Jeanne Bernard, she grows up to become an ingénue in Paris in the early ’60s, an haute couture runway model in the ’70s and a middle-aged philanthropist shortly after German reunification.
The hourlong act is a dazzling succession of set pieces — the somber convent, a sophisticated cafe in Saint-Germain-des-Près, an overstuffed fashion show and a fund-raising gala at Alexanderplatz — as the actors take us through the stations of a life both marked by incredible fortune and regret. After visiting a tarot card reader, Jeanne decides to place her twins for adoption in order to pursue her career. The fortune telling scene is the first of many hints of magic and the macabre in the show, and Alina Vimbai Strähler portrays Jeanne with a zest for life and wide-eyed wonder.
The middle, dialogue-heavy acts bring a sudden shift in tone. After a flashy prologue where a magician schmoozes with the audience, a subdued Act II focuses on a West German woman (Stephanie Eidt) who develops a gambling addiction during a weekend of marital discord in Baden-Baden.
After hitting rock bottom, she manages to rid herself of her loutish husband (a convincingly despicable Christoph Gawenda) and finds romance with an East German slot machine programmer (a suave Stefan Stern, peering from under the brim of a cowboy hat). From there, the focus shifts to Matthias (also played by Gawenda), a German soldier and dog handler who is traumatized by his two tours of duty in Afghanistan.
He decides to see a young therapist named Juju (Stähler again) to work through his frustration at seeing the Taliban take power again in Afghanistan and the grief he still feels for the dog he lost during an attack.
Does it matter that Matthias is the son of the gambling addict from the previous act, or that Juju is the daughter of the waitress who served Matthias’ parents dinner in Baden-Baden? I’m not sure that it does, but the show works hard to make these links, as Lepage traces his character’s tangled lineages.
As the connections and coincidences pile on, “Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe” increasingly feels like a soap opera. Nowhere is this more evident than in the fourth and final act, about a gay couple in Germany looking for a surrogate. They hire a woman in Ukraine (Magdalena Lermer projects both resolve and fragility): the due date is March 2022. Needless to say, things do not go according to plan. By the final scene, your head is spinning from all the reversals, twists and revelations.
There’s a lot of ground to cover and Lepage turns to technology to help him manage the myriad temporal and geographic dislocations. Four large flat screen monitors help transform the stage into a midcentury Parisian cafe, a casino at Baden-Baden, a Berlin art gallery or an army tent in Afghanistan. (Félix Fradet-Faguy designed the video.)
In the production’s most technologically dazzling sequence, the screens rise and tilt to depict a plane taking off — you can almost feel the lift off — then transform, in quick succession, into the arrival boards at the Berlin airport and the Kharkiv train station. This brief sequence provides one of the most transporting moments in this lengthy show, whose characters and narratives seem overly plotted and contrived. The acting is robust and the production is handsome, yet the play itself feels as stable as a house of cards.
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