Enigmatic and revolutionary

Two large black walls flank the entrance to the exhibition on Berlin’s Pariser Platz. A triangular cut-out provides the only access to the rooms behind: A kind of passepartout, it forms both a boundary and a striking aesthetic statement, of the kind that Erich Wonder made in the stage spaces he created. It’s inspired by Wonder’s stage set for Heiner Müller’s revolution play Der Auftrag, staged at Schauspielhaus Bochum in 1982.

Marking the then 33-year-old stage designer’s first cooperation with the dramatist Heiner Müller, the set played with ideas of concealing and revealing, condensing various contradictory things, situations, and events. Echoing its concept, the entrance situation steers visitors’ movements and prompts them to reflect – as each of the black wall panels shows a Müller quote: “Erich Wonder is one of the few artists in his field who have reached the point from which arbitrariness becomes genius.”

It's a compelling start to an exhibition that opens a window on to a recent era of change, in which these two artists were key figures. It all started, then, with Der Auftrag, which was followed by Der Lohndrücker in 1988, Hamlet/Maschine at the Deutsches Theater Berlin in 1989/90, and Tristan and Isolde at the Bayreuth Festival in 1993. Having held Heiner Müller’s estate since 1998, the Berlin Akademie der Künste recently acquired Erich Wonder’s creative archive; it has now mounted the exhibition to showcase the genesis of these productions and remember the duo’s unusual artistic friendship. Of the 146 productions that Wonder worked on in total, only four were with Müller. Wonder’s oeuvre, then, encompasses far more than this exhibition shows. Yet the four productions with  Müller were representative of an era and testify to a special chemistry between the two stage artists.

The light in the black box
From 1972 to 1978, Wonder was stage designer for Schauspiel Frankfurt: “Frankfurt made a big impact on me. The city was different, much rougher, like Little Chicago, not slick like it is now,” he has been quoted as saying. The station drug scene, street fighting, and political conflict all created an urban aesthetic which for him was primarily expressed in light. He was also strongly influenced by ​contemporary film and the likes of Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick, and how they conveyed the light in American cities in their films. Wonder took these influences and put them – through the lens of the reality of German cities and their light – into the black box of the stage. The way Wonder transposed this light by technological means on to the stage was nothing short of revolutionary for the late seventies: the neon lights of the big city, the feel of night-time on the roads, a hazy shimmering. His choice of lighting media was extraordinary for the time, opting for daylight spots and fluorescent tubes. It was a historic development. Naturalism had finally had its day. 

Wonder has been dubbed “the cameraman of spaces” for his use of light influenced by cinema aesthetics and industrial architecture, reflected in elaborate on-stage interiors. An array of black and white photographs, night shots that he took in the seventies, show washes of light and moody wastelands in night-time Frankfurt, the reflections of lights in windows on the black waters of the River Main, garish streetlights, rows of illuminated high-rises. These early pictorial impressions reverberate in all his work for the stage. Between archaic and high-tech modern For the piece Der Lohndrücker, Wonder travelled to East Berlin to join Heiner Müller at the Deutsches Theater. It was the Austrian stage designer’s first encounter with the socialist state and East German theatre. 

The makers of the exhibition have reconstructed the ‘Ring furnace’, an armoured tower crossed with a world-war 2 bunker, which Wonder designed for the stage set, and to which Heiner Müller added the words: “(secret of the play) Auschwitz-Chernobyl furnace”. It’s an impressive sight, as are the photos by Sybille Bergemann and Jürgen Henschel, which show the starting point of the drama: the state-owned industrial plant in the East Berlin district of Lichtenberg, producing coal for firing in power stations, before and after the fall of the Wall. Wonder’s visual concepts, together with Müller’s texts, propelled late-twentieth-century theatre towards rethinking the stage set, the stage space. They made it clear that reality could no longer be reflected in classic dramaturgies. From the ice cube to the stock cube

Alongside Der Lohndrücker, much of the main hall of the exhibition is dedicated to the production Hamlet/Maschine. Original costumes (by Christine Stromberg), production photos that Wonder painted over, and series of contact prints show the directorial and creative team at rehearsals. Also ​displayed are hand-drawn sketches and scene sequences, designs, correspondence with the workshops, Polaroids, photos of models and the set rehearsal, hastily scribbled ideas, records of meetings, transcribed interviews, audio-visual recordings of rehearsals and performances and lastly stills and reviews of the shows.

Exhibition curator Stephan Suschke, theatre director and head of drama at Landestheater Linz, who worked closely with Müller from 1987 until his death in 1995, describes their cooperation: “Müller came up with this nice phrase, ‘From the ice cube to the stock cube’. He rephrased it in a few more words when he said: ‘The next century’ – that is, the current one – ‘will be the century of climate disaster – from the ice age to the desert’. And Wonder created exactly that on the stage. With great precision, he showed a desert landscape emerging from an ice cube on the stage of the Deutsches Theater. And Müller just used that.” Quite magically.

Wonder hated static spaces. He became expert in the use of painted gauzes, hung one behind the other, changing their relative transparency by lighting them separately. Through the superimposed layers, the images seem to float in the space. While this technique had previously been used for naturalist stage sets, Wonder extended it to create exuberantly abstract, moving visual compositions. And often took it further by combining it with a revolving stage and moving dollies. This technique appeared eminently suitable for staging the through-composed works of Richard Wagner. So, when Heiner Müller took on Tristan and Isolde for the Bayreuth Festival in 1993, as a newcomer to opera, he naturally engaged the services of Erich Wonder. And that was to be their last collaboration.