tuAnd then walk through the night streets of Berlin – Torstraße, Rosenthaler, Auguststraße – and read the slogans of the newly opened restaurants: “Contemporary Pizza”, “Vegan Burger Culture”, “Natural Superfood”. Ahead, light blazes from the Apple Store Cathedral, brightly lit, as if the energy crisis is taking place on another planet. The screens flicker, the advertising works: a young couple devoutly stands in front of her and points out her longings. And now? What is to come? How is everything? History? Dialectical? Revolution?
“And now?” is the name of the latest theater study of the old theoretician and new director of Volksbühnen, René Pollesch. It is about two skilled workers from the Schwedt Petrol-Chemical Combine (PCK) who, on a balmy summer afternoon, are rehearsing a critical didactic play called “Horizon” for the company’s worker theater. Surprised by the night watchman (with real experience in the workers’ theater: Franz Blei), they soon start talking about the influence of electronic data processing on interpersonal relationships and the danger of a philistinism that blocks entire streets just to get a sense of security. freedom online. skate after work to get.
There is no longer any trace of self-provocation or inconsistency. So, what to do in a society “that has become the fridge”? Lutz and Klaus, the two Schwedt workers in their overalls, in their white plastic chairs, with cigarette butts in their hands, wonder about this. Agitprop, that was once. Today only the most serious moral event is possible. Or ironic hindsight.
with a bit of badminton
Everything that Martin Wuttke as Klaus and Milan Peschel as Lutz say that night, everything they devour fragments of thought or chew like fragments of history, serves a single, eternally unattainable goal: to blather against meaningless silence, because “in The The best way to listen is to listen.” The claim of the evening hour and a half is the constant response. No question can go unanswered, no opinion without comment. From the start, Wuttke and Peschel appear as a chatty bar couple, like two old buddies explaining the world to each other, sometimes with spouting party doctrines, sometimes with a bit of badminton, and they don’t do that too badly. . Above all, the beginning and end (the middle goes down a bit cybernetically) are starred in an entertaining mix of real-life sentimentality and theoretical assertion.
The Three from the Schwedter Gas Station: Franz Beil, Milan Peschel and Martin Wuttke
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Image: Apollonia T. Bitzan
Peschel encourages Wuttke, who is sometimes a bit too self-sufficient, in a collegiate manner, sends him through the recreation area of the PCK factory that Anna Viebrock has rebuilt with a swimming pool and bleachers, rhetorically lets him run, does he laughs as he speaks, hugging him against his will. Because: “Anyone who thinks against himself knows that there is a residue that is not broken by thought” – again and again little brief pleas about the value of dialectic emerge from the rippled surface of private discourse, seem secret, secretly smuggled among all the material and what was communicated, the “notes with dog ears”.
Está servido: Milan Peschel, Martin Wuttke, Franz Beil
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Image: Apollonia T. Bitzan
Truly, this is the key message of this fun-filled evening: Let’s not lose our love for ambiguous things! The renunciation of any allusion to day-to-day politics is striking and frankly provocative. Everything here is meant to be historical or timeless. The historical background is clarified several times: in 1968, the author Gerhard Winterlich wrote the play “Horizon” for the Schwedt Arbeitertheater, based on Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, which was adapted for the Volksbühne by Benno Besson and Heiner Muller the following year. Schwedt and a soft midsummer night’s dream: that sounds almost sarcastic today, when thousands of workers in the damaged eastern German city fear for their jobs at that very PCK plant because their refinery is directly affected by the embargo of oil.
As if the Berlin capital theater is not interested in the true fate of the workers there, but only uses them as film figures for an entertaining little retro show with a burst of flashes and film music by Louis de Funes. You can definitely blame the evening and imagine, also in retro style, what Pollesch’s predecessor Frank Castorf would have used the material for: probably for a brutal critique of the Federal Republic.
We are never contemporaries!
But Pollesch’s Pointenparalando can also be seen and received in a friendlier way, namely as a tireless search for the lost penny. And this penny still means to him: pathos means tragedy, it means theater as it once was. Basically, as Wuttkes Klaus explains with disarming ingenuity, everything is already in the past when he comes into the world: the phrase has already been thought of, the look has already been cast, light is always faster than the image. “So we are never contemporaries.”
Pollesch’s evenings at the theater are like the last smiling glance into the scratched mirror of a wardrobe abandoned by all the stars and starlets: a fun little en passant with beautiful music and some theoretical critiques in between. No microports, no cryptocurrencies. Instead: three actors, a prompter and the certainty: “You have to deal with so many things.” She doesn’t help walking the nocturnal consumer mile. Only the question from the beginning remains and she drives: “And now?”
