Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel and Grupa Coincidentia: Krabat

Brechtian Sorcery: Deconstructing a German Children’s Classic

Krabat by Figurentheater Wilde & Vogel and Grupa Coincidentia

An Essay by T. Cusack

For this spectator, the most inspiring and memorable piece of theater I experienced at the 2024 edition of the Chicago International Puppet Theater Festival was unquestionably Krabat, a co-production of Figurentheater [Charlotte] Wilde & [Michael] Vogel from Leipzig and Stuttgart, Germany, and Grupa Coincidentia, located in Bialystok, Poland. However, not all would seem to have agreed with this assessment as, over the course of the weekend that I was there, I overheard more than one lively dispute in the festival’s public café concerning this particular offering. Certainly, by the end of the sold-out, late-night Saturday performance I attended, half the audience was standing and shouting “Bravo!” while the other half sat in bewildered silence. 

Krabat is an adaptation of the 1971 classic German children’s novel Krabat & the Sorcerer’s Mill by Otfried Preussler, which won his country’s equivalent of the Newbery Medal the year after its publication.¹ Amazon recommends the book for readers eight to twelve years old on the product page for the English translation, but this theatrical adaptation is suitable for only the most precocious of elementary school students. It’s a dark tale, one not always easy to follow in this production’s nonlinear, avant-garde approach: An orphan boy is recruited to work in a mill as an apprentice grinding flour, but every Friday night the miller (a.k.a. the Master) gathers his twelve workers together to train them in the arts of black magic. Each New Year’s Day one of them must die in order for the Master to live, who then goes out to find a new orphan to replace the unlucky sacrificial victim. The only way for this cyclical spell to be broken would be for one of the men to fall in love and his paramour to pick him out successfully from a lineup of all of the apprentices (who have been transformed into birds for the occasion). Given the Master’s command of magic, power to read minds, and ability to metamorphosize his employees into various creatures at will, no one has ever succeeded in this trial, until Krabat comes along. And while technically the ending could be considered a conventionally “happy” one in the manner of fairy tales, since boy gets girl and defeats his powerful foe, the hero’s ultimate triumph against the forces arrayed against him comes at an enigmatic price that sprinkles a dusting of existential angst over the victory. 

In the language of materiality spoken by the production, this dusting becomes a lingering, literal force as a pall of what is presumably flour from the eponymous mill of the original book’s title hangs in the space around the stage, settles on its floor, and smears the faces of the actors.² On one hand, this material gesture serves a stage-adaptation purpose, as it helps dramatize passages like this one from the original:

Krabat set to work, but after wielding his broom a few times he was enveloped in a thick cloud of flour, like dust…It was like an endless nightmare—flour and more flour, great clouds of it, like mist, like flurrying snow (Preussler, 2014 [1971]: 24).

However, the omnipresent powder also performs a powerful semiotic function within the mise-en-scène—beyond merely setting the scene. The flecks hanging in the air suggest the aftermath of a battle. They create a hazy smokescreen that both obscures the action and provides a refractive surface for disorienting stage lighting effects. They generate an instinctive sensorial response in the viewer that activates memories of choking on air polluted with particulate matter. They evoke the material conditions endured by too many workers toiling in unsafe and unhealthy conditions characterized by poor ventilation and the presence of toxic substances aloft. 

The materiality of the “flour” grounds us in the material conditions of the main character’s labor, and this is perhaps why audiences were so divided over this performance: This is a children’s book adaptation that eschews the bright colors, clean lines, and shiny surfaces often employed by theater for young audiences. Instead, I would argue that this is a Brechtian deconstruction of the source text that foregrounds the class conflict and economic exploitation embedded within its fantastical narrative, while deemphasizing the romance rescue plot so beloved of bourgeois theater. Brechtian alienation effects abound: exposed-brick back wall and stage machinery, a live musician (Charlotte Wilde) visibly creating the sound score, actors gathering in rehearsal clothes as a group at the top of the show and switching characters in full view of the audience throughout, written text commenting on the action, bright lights shining into the auditorium—and puppets. As puppeteer and scholar John Bell has pointed out “…every instance of puppet performance is marked by the distanced performance methods that Brecht…and many others developed in their own experiments to make theatre” (Bell, 2014: 44).³ 

Just as Brecht transformed traditional folk tales into theatrical parables meant to critique capitalism and class status–based hypocrisy, Wilde, Vogel, and Pawel Chomczyk, Dagmara Sowa, and Florin Feisel from Grupa Coincidentia have done much the same with Preussler’s contemporary fairy tale. As noted Brecht translator, Eric Bentley, wrote about Caucasian Chalk Circle “…[Brecht] uses other stories and mythic patterns, and pulls them in, brings them as we say ‘down to earth,’ in concrete, modern meanings” (1999 [1966]: 180). The motes of dust floating in the air and coating every surface on the stage—living and inert—serves a paradoxical gravitational function, thickening the atmosphere and rooting the fantastical episodes of the narrative in the harsh exploitative realities contained within any workplace. The sorcerer in this version of the story is the one from The Communist Manifesto: the bourgeois figure who can no longer control the forces his incantations of commerce have unleashed.⁴ This is the knowledge of black magic the Master wants to impart to Kravat: the dark spell of capitalism that transforms the material world into columns of bank figures all the while poisoning the planet, cloaking itself in invisibility, and mesmerizing us into cheering for its ubiquitous stranglehold on our lives. This critique, of course, runs completely counter to our conditioning as Americans for whom markets are always supposed to be viewed as forces for good. Seen through this lens, it’s no wonder some folks didn’t like the show. 

At almost the exact halfway point of the performance, the company stages a sequence that masterfully manipulates materiality to encapsulate the themes present throughout. Feisel fits what looks like a megaphone or tuba horn in his mouth. Chomczyk tosses something inside of it (bones?). Feisel has a thin metal tube protruding from the back of his pants and a wheel attached to the side of this body. He turns the wheel, and white powder flows out from his derriere, forming a diagonal line as he walks backwards upstage. Vogel and Sowa follow, manipulating long, slender rods that act as part walking sticks, part indexical instruments, part dowsing rods. Vogal carries a skull-like mask-puppet next to his face and wears an oversized bony claw on one of his hands. He performs an oddly jubilant dance along the white stream scattered on the floor. It’s a disturbing image of both the neoliberal fantasy of man fusing with machine to form a perfect unit of “productivity”— actionable even when defecating—and of the danse macabre that is the annual office holiday party that rewards our continual capitulation to the system with the opportunity to obliterate ourselves with food and drink. These artists are imploring us to change the tune before the sinister forces our civilization continues to unleash proves our undoing. 

But perhaps the most effective alienation device, though, is the small, doll-like object that “plays” (or, more accurately, stands in for) the title role throughout the piece. Mute for most of the performance and largely motionless, lacking in articulated joints, dressed in ragged cloth with a stringy hay-like substance for hair, and painted a sickly pewter gray, it is more silent, disempowered observer than heroic actant of the story. The paper Three Kings crown on its head remains for the duration of the show and serves as an ironic commentary on the character’s fundamental lack of agency.⁵ At numerous points throughout the performance, he appears almost lost onstage, dwarfed by the other theatrical elements. The various members of the cast, both male and female, take turns interacting with the figurine, crouching next to him to deliver a line as the character. This continual disruption of a 1:1 relationship between human performer and narrative role helps to thwart the audience’s identification with and empathy for the protagonist, in the prescribed manner of Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt. 

At the very end of the piece, the young village girl whom Krabat has successfully courted approaches the mill for the final showdown between the forces of light and dark, Eros and Thanatos. She must successfully pick her future husband out of a row of ravens, or they will both die. To help achieve victory, Krabat casts a spell of psychic binding between them so that she will be able to intuitively know which one he is. The production honors the letter of Preussler’s narrative intention for the positive resolution obligatory to children’s literature, but their material choices for staging this ending simultaneously undercut it in several unsettling ways. Krabat’s binding spell is physicalized as a floating scrap of a plastic shopping sack that magically becomes larger and larger as it is passed from one member of the cast to another until finally it is large enough to completely encase Sowa, who plays the fiancée. The levitating polyurethane doesn’t evoke the invisible power of love so much as the detritus of a Western “civilization” whose greatest legacy may prove to be massive landfills and garbage patches littering the oceans. Is this opaque material meant to signify a bridal veil or a body bag? Will she suffocate before she reaches her beloved across the stage? Meanwhile, Wilde’s music is reaching a driving, discordant crescendo, contributing to the sense of doom and anxiety. Sowa survives the crossing and reveals that she is holding a doll-like figure of similar size and design as Krabat. The girl is a singer, and the face of her effigy is carved with a wide open “O” mouth, which could be forming a musical note—or a scream of horror. When the two figures finally unite, the human cast positions them so that their backs are facing the audience, Krabat’s arm around her shoulders. The cacophony rages; lights painfully flash; the puppets remain immobile. They may have joined forces to defeat the immediate representative of the system, but the system itself still overwhelms with its crushing, paralyzing, disorienting force. We don’t know exactly what they are looking at, but we know it’s no good.