Torsten Krug /// director / singer / author

Stones

Youth play by Tom Lycos and Stefo Nantsou

Director: Torsten Krug
Set and costumes: Nanni Marotzke
Dramaturgy: Saskia Leistner

Thuringian State Theater Rudolstadt
January 2007

With:
Alexander Darkov (Diesel)
Gregor Wolf (Flo)
Torsten Krug stages this with two highly talented drama school graduates so precisely and relentlessly that it touches on one's own aggression and helplessness.

Volker Hagedorn, DIE ZEIT
It's pure exuberance. At first. Daring and impetuous, Flo and Diesel, 12 and 15 years old, romp through their little world, shaking the barriers. Locked the garage door, unreachable the object of desire: a Mercedes star as a trophy. What to do with the seething energy, the desire for the untested? The young director Torsten Krug, with the slightly younger actors Gregor Wolf (Flo) and Alexander Darkow (Diesel), hits this daredevil daring between thirst for action and catastrophe with a fascinating state of limbo that drives everyday banality into the circling maelstrom of a nightmare. What started as a game ends in horror. Stones on passing cars hit a person fatally ... Then the two, still children and burdened with guilt, are faced with a consequence to which the two actors in the roles of their police opponents search for an answer. Almost out of nothing - just two gray tube parts, a metal ladder - Andrea Marotzke has built a playing surface on which the rotating alternation of power and coolness develops from a basic musical-rhythmic movement. The director and actors - Gregor Wolf now playfully solved after "Boxerherz", Alexander Darkow still a little tense - manage to play a game hard on the border between carelessness and crime. And only a tiny gesture at the end points to opposite paths of the two boys in the future.

Erika Stephan, Thuringian General
Every hour, "The Criminal Court", "The Family Court" and "The Juvenile Court" rain down on the viewer on RTL. Not a case that hasn't already been dealt with in a TV court show. What's the point of a youth play like "Stones", which premiered on Thursday in the production of Torsten Krug in the Rudolstadt theater? The answer is given by the mostly young audience at the end of the performance itself, looking concerned, applauding politely and arguing vigorously outside in the cold. Flo (13) and Diesel (15) spend their time doing things boys their age do all over the world: testing limits, testing courage. To the music of Nirvana (the teenagers are really hearing that again now!) they climb around the warehouse, lovingly call themselves "shitty idiot ass face", read stones from a stream. They throw them - what fun! - from a motorway bridge. The last stone hits fatally killed a driver. The children run away, calling for their mother. Police interrogations and court hearings follow. Gregor Wolf (Flo/Quandt) and Alexander Darkow (Diesel/Rottner) play both the boys and the interrogating police officers. Only a cap on their heads or a tie under the jacket make the transformation externally clear.The game of the two is all the more intense, the insecure Flo is the understanding police officer, the nasty Diesel the tough cop.The duo acts in a spartan setting (equipment Andrea Marotzke) from two rectangular Hollow bodies and a ladder, any props only hinted at in pantomime Everything in this piece is so focused on the question of silly boy prank or murder, guilty or not guilty, which aggressively engages the divided audience. In the end, the acquitted Flo is back on the motorway bridge. He learned his lesson, and so did the audience. No court show has ever had so much depth.

East Thuringian newspaper
Share by: