Obituary for actress Jutta Lampe: Oh! – Culture

Anyone who has heard this “oh” and seen Jutta Lampe standing on the empty revolving stage will not forget the scene. She was Alkmene in Kleist’s Amphitryon, and it was the last word of the piece. She seemed rather astonished to have gone through the evil game that Jupiter had played with her, with her and her husband Amphitryon, into whose form the god had changed. Klaus Michael Grüber co-staged the “Comedy after Molière” in 1991, but rather in the supporting roles. In the center, where Jutta Lampe was standing, the confusion of the doppelganger between man and God was a dream game. The actress must have been aware of the nightmare in it, she played Alcmene as astonished and wounded at the same time. A small moon hung over her. Lamp had made her an ally, and if there was a hint of “Oh so”, “That’s how it was, now I have understood” in her “Oh”, then it was a non-communicable insight from the realm of the Lunatics.

It might be earthly coquetry that she kept quiet about her date of birth. The official version was that she was born in Flensburg on December 13, 1943. In fact it was 1937. In Hamburg, with Eduard Marks, she completed her acting training, via Wiesbaden and Mannheim she came to Bremen, where she was Lady Milford in 1967 in “Kabale und Liebe”. Directed by Peter Stein, with him she was one of the founding figures of the Berlin Schaubühne on Halleschen Ufer.

She had and fulfilled the highest standards of acting

The three decades of ties to the Schaubühne, until shortly before the turn of the millennium, shaped them, and they shaped the Schaubühne. Peter Stein, with whom she also had a private relationship for years, may have promoted a collective theater, but as a director he was the collective singular Stein, carried by a tradition that revered the type of the ruthless artist: as the embodiment of the highest demands in art . Jutta Lampe embodied these highest demands in her own way. The omission, withholding, and suggestion of dimensions of a figure that lie beyond language were a characteristic of her acting.

The mental reservation one does not like to call it, rather reservation of the soul, which radiates over the whole body. This body was slim, but it could absorb a great deal of tension, and the voice could sing, even if it was not singing but speaking. Even the ethereal in it was not suitable for a fixed attribution. You could see that in 1983 in her Mascha in Peter Stein’s production of Chekhov’s “Three Sisters”. The production has become famous as the last great bloom of the elegiac Chekhov cult, as a document of a not only clandestine agreement of disaffected former revolutionaries with the standstill of history. But Lampes Mascha did not celebrate Chekhov’s famous boredom. Her Mascha was annoyed and bitchy, wore her elegant, snappy boredom as a mask behind which a tremendous, dangerous pleasure in slamming was hidden.

She could throw very suggestive looks and simulate depth even where there was none

Five years later she was the landowner Ranjewskaja in the “cherry orchard”, and whoever overlooked the pity with which she looked down at the effects of her lack of stability behind the coquetry with which she celebrated her careless handling of coins could not be helped . Perhaps he had fallen for her eyes. She could throw very suggestive looks and simulate depth even where there was none.

Her voice seemed to deepen in moments of ambiguity, easily able to take on the color of resentment and mortification. She dominated the view from above down at neighboring figures even when they were taller than her. At some point the adjective “girlish” was attached to her. She could wear this mask too. But when, for example in the popular comparison with Edith Clever, the great tragedy and nervous, the girl mask became a kind of Jutta lamp special discipline, it was fatal. At least when the association of harmlessness was involved. Because Lampe’s art included exploring the friendly expression of the bad game. It could be concentrated energy, only it did not give the expressive “bundle of energy” so popular on German stages.

But the energy was there. Otherwise she would not have been able to span the bow in “The Balance” by Botho Strauss, and not have stood up to the eagle so confidently in the “Final Choir” by the same author. And otherwise her joint appearance with Edith Clever in 2005 in Strauss’ “Die one and the other”, the play about two aging acting rivals, would have gotten out of balance. At that time, the two of them could already look back on pieces in which Clever had directed and Lampe stood on stage: as Winnie in Beckett’s “Happy Days”, where she talked about the absent happiness, only to deny it with a friendly smile. And in “Hausbesuch” by Rudolf Borchardt, she played the men we are only talking about right away, not without a certain sarcasm.

She tied herself to the theater and to theater directors. She only made trips to film with Margarethe von Trotta

The fact that Jutta Lampe became one of the greatest actresses of her generation might have something to do with the fact that, despite all of her ties to Peter Stein, she developed and fanned out her art in collaboration with many directors. Klaus Michael Grüber was one of them, in whose “Hamlet” she faced Bruno Ganz as a clairvoyant Ophelia, as a figure of another knowledge, which did not disappear even in madness. In any case, she was a long way from the girlish, flower- and blossom-drunk Ophelias, who had staged the Pre-Raphaelites of the 19th century as beautiful water corpses with long-lasting effects.

Luc Bondy was also one of her directors, in his production of Marivaux ‘”Triumph der Liebe” (1985) she was, without knowing it, already on the way to her Alcmene. As a princess in men’s clothes, behind yew hedges and in the midst of classicist temple ruins, she staged confusion of identity like Jupiter later. She smiled a lot in this play, was slim as a page, but she carried out comedy as a theater of cruelty, consciously of power.

Robert Wilson’s theater has a penchant for surface, for two-dimensional picture theater. From this, Jutta Lampe emerged in “Orlando” as a three-dimensional figure of play and narrative at the same time – and crossed gender lines even before the queerness debates broke out.

In contrast, she hardly crossed the borders of the theater. She played in three films for Margarethe von Trotta: 1979 in “Schwestern oder die Balance des Glücks”, 1981 in “Die Bleierne Zeit” (where Lampe played Gudrun Ensslin’s sister) and in 2003 again in “Rosenstrasse”. But those were lonely excursions into the film.

After the turn of the millennium she returned to the Schaubühne as Racine’s Andromache, staged by Luk Perceval. But she didn’t have much future as an actress. A long time ago she was seized by an illness that shut her up in itself. So it became quiet around them. Now the great actress Jutta Lampe has died in Berlin. She was 82 years old.