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Perhaps it should have been made like the Elizabethan theater in London more than 400 years ago. At the time, the leads were supposedly allowed to fight fencing matches before the performance, so that they would start fiery on stage when the curtain went up. The heroic actors of the first electoral campaign duel for the post of the US president walked stiff and visibly restless towards their two blue lecterns. As if Joe Biden and Donald Trump had each practiced their text alone in the wardrobe until shortly before the performance.
Only after a few minutes in the first television duel between the two US presidential candidates, their tongues and bodies relaxed. The more robust of the two heroes on stage divided the air with his right hand extended, as if trying to cut off each opponent’s argument. The slimmer white-haired opponent, on the other hand, limited his motor skills to waving his extended index finger. They both seemed agitated and in no way confident.
Head first
According to an old rule of criticism, the basic requirement for a successful theatrical production is that the director manage to completely eliminate any fidgeting of the actors with their hands and legs during rehearsal work. A good actor, as director George Tabori once said about the great Gert Voss, has to jump at the idea “like a wild bull that has escaped from the cage.” So, not with the limbs flapping, but with the skull first.
The audience at the premiere of “Joe Biden vs. Donald Trump” really wanted to see some blood in the auditorium at the University of Cleveland and in front of television screens Tuesday night. It wasn’t waiting so long for what the two main characters in the drama had to say, but rather for minor setbacks, sweats, stumbles, or even blackouts.
It’s like in the theater, whose highly evoked live character draws audiences under its spell, especially when something really goes wrong on stage. When the heroes up there accidentally cut themselves with swords or collapse from the ramp, panting. It can be said that the performance was surprisingly calm in this regard.
Well, Trump’s face flushed over the course of the staging, while his challenger Biden still looked a little paler the more often the president interrupted him. The fact that there was still no real tension is due to the fact that the two actors on stage acted according to directions from different times. Trump sought eye contact with his teammate in a form of psychological realism as once with Gustaf Gründgens, while Biden always spoke directly to the audience, as in the modern, anti-illusionist director’s theater of Frank Castorf and his friends. .
Is the sympathy bonus enough for the final applause?
In fact, the two of them didn’t even play the same piece. Trump is a character that Shakespeare could have invented, unfortunately Biden is only from an Ibsen play, as director Leander Haussmann had expertly instructed me the night before the duel.
Indeed, aside from anger, errant praise of one’s own merits, and constant misrepresentation of even the most obvious facts, which Trump also practiced virtuously tonight, as in Shakespeare’s maddening drama “Richard III.” borrowed. Joe Biden’s clever, fact-based argumentation follows the temperament of the doctors and bathroom builders in Ibsen’s dramas.
Biden hesitated a couple of times and probably unintentionally reminded many of his listeners that he had trouble speaking fluently at a young age. But will this sympathy bonus really get you the final big applause? I am skeptical about that. For Biden’s plight and his courage to show weakness, what playwright Ibsen said about victorious heroes should apply: “A vulnerable heel does not make an Achilles.”
