Marga von Etzdorf and Melli Beese
An obituary
by Maja Das Gupta
NUR FLIEGEND is the first collaboration with the young author Maja Das Gupta. Based on an idea of the author, the play will be created in dialogue between her and the director. At the center of ONLY FLYING are two women who were considered pioneers in their time because they were the first women to fly. For them, life was only worth living by flying.
From the author’s synopsis: “Melly Beese had already entered a male domain with her first degree, studying sculpture. Then suddenly the thought of flying. And not only that: she will design airplanes herself, run a flight school. Until she falls in love with the wrong man, a Frenchman. At the time of World War 1, public enemy number one – her flying license is revoked. After the world war, she tries an aeronautical come back and fails. A little later she takes her own life.
Marga von Etzdorf suffers a similar fate: Coming from an upper middle-class family, she too wants only one thing, to the horror of her parents: to fly. In the meantime, there have been some flying women, but a “bourgeois lifestyle” looks different. Marga gets her way. She becomes one of the first long-haul pilots. When she makes a serious technical error during a landing that damages her plane, she knows: No one will ever trust her with one again. She shoots herself while still on the airfield.
The figures are artist personalities, in the moment of flying they realize their work. They are united by a radical self-understanding that doesn’t ask for a second about the economic benefits of their own actions – an exciting topic in an age that puts utility above all else.”
Premiere: 02 May 2012 at the Theater im Ballsaal, Bonn
“Award-winning playwright Das Gupta, a 2002 participant in the Bonn Biennale’s Young Writers’ Meeting, wrote the work as part of the fringe-writers project commissioned by the fringe ensemble. Despite various original quotes and biographical testimonies, it is not a docu-drama, but a study of two very different women who radically realized their dream of flying and in the process broke through male air supremacy.
Fringe director Frank Heuel stages the daredevil women with their flying boxes in a successful mixture of airy freedom pathos and burning passion. … enthusiastic cheers at the sold-out fringe premiere.”
Elisabeth Einecke-Klövekorn, General-Anzeiger Bonn, May 05, 2012
“The Gupta’s first performance in the ballroom uses pathos as a theatrical tone, transforming flies into mystery. For his label fringe-writers, Frank Heuel had ordered something from her for two actresses, Bettina Marugg of the fringe ensemble and Petra Weimer of the Theater Rampe Stuttgart. Both are really strong in the co-production of the two stages. Played to the highly specialized theater line of Heuels fringe ensemble, which develops the text and performance together with the authors.
It’s Heuel’s signature that you see on the ballroom stage. Between large projection screens, the two female pilots sit in the cockpit in front of their instruments, dressed in leather and wearing dark aviator goggles. Behind them opens the mystically shining sky, which belongs only to them. Or you look into an empty airplane cabin. Almost surprisingly, the text and Heuel’s flexible handling of it and the two aviator heroines work really well.”
H. D. Terschüren, Bonner Rundsschau, May 05, 2012
From September 25 to 28 we will show NUR FLIEGEND at studiobühnekoeln.