Stefan Schütz

Odysseus' Heimkehr
13 Bilder
3 D, 14 H, (Doppelbesetzungen möglich), St, Verwandlungsdek
UA: 03.05.1981 · Wuppertaler Bühnen · Directed by: Uta Birnbaum
“When Stefan Schütz’s Odysseus, after years of wandering, wakes up hungry and thirsty on the beach of Ithaca in the tattered robe of a beggar, he meets the swineherd Eumaios, who looks after him. But he cannot even bear food and drink. Odysseus no longer recognises his land. It has been corrupted from the ground up. Humans and animals are stricken with lesions, scabs and leprosy which make the women lustful and the men weak. The people have aged excessively, while Odysseus, who in their imaginations has been dead for centuries, has stayed young. Telemachus does not hurry home from Sparta to stand by his returned father in the battle against the suitors – he has become accountant of the allegedly benevolent scab and, like the suitors, woos Penelope, his mother. Penelope represents the power of the land, and at the same time the land itself, and wants to become the wife of whomever she likes sleeping with the most, so tries them all out. Odysseus, the only healthy person on Ithaca, is an outsider in this situation and is easily stylised into a monster. He wants to free his land from scabs. But it is futile, and in order to regain power anyway, he comes up with the idea of erecting public scratching machines for the itches that the scabs cause. He tries to get Telemachus on his side and tells him of his plan. He is murdered immediately. Telemachus marries Penelope and establishes a dictatorship with the help of Odysseus’ scratching machines, which are immediately built under his direction and which he then controls. He lets the people use them or withholds them as punishment. The higher authority that he calls up as legitimation for his sovereignty is the already mythologised Odysseus.” (Süddeutsche Zeitung)
Translated into: Korean