“The future used to be better.” This sentence comes from Karl Valentin and is getting truer every year. Tomorrow is nowhere near as rosy as it seemed yesterday. Needless to say, people have had a particularly bad time and it takes a lot of imagination to imagine that everything will soon be much better.
So it’s understandable that people want nostalgic escapism. Take refuge in memories and think about who you used to be and how small the problems seem today that were big back then. “We have lost the future, so we look back,” explains the performance collective Gob Squad in the performance “1984: Back to No Future”, which, after a world premiere in Copenhagen, now premiered at the Leipzig Theater. However, this retrospective here is a family-personal navel look; the collective has surprisingly little interest in political developments or overall social contexts.
Four performers, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastian Trost and Damian Rebgetz meet under the roof in the residence of the Schauspiel Leipzig. In costumes that would have been found futuristic in the 1980s and Andy Warhol memory hairstyles, they dance around to classic pop medleys before embarking on a journey back in time to 1984. 1984, of course, that is the George Orwell year and accordingly one of the four is always sitting at a computer as the commanding “big brother”. Beamed back to their children’s rooms, which they find behind the blinds, they visit their past selves. My posters, my old street, and look, my children’s fears!
As cathartic as looking back into the corner of the heart may be for the individual, it is of little interest to a larger audience
Damian Rebgetz, who grew up in Australia, was very afraid of crocodiles and cyclones, in Great Britain, where Sarah Thom comes from, there was a certain horror of Margaret Thatcher. And of course the daily threatening nuclear catastrophe, which was feared everywhere in 1984. The Big Brother asks the performers to build a shelter from the nuclear emergency in a video game that is beamed onto a screen. They build it from old mixtapes, a protective wall from the music of the eighties, which, occasionally turned up briefly, represents the most seductive of the nostalgic forces.
But then not much more happens. Major Orwell theses such as “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” are touched upon as much as possible. Germany, which is still divided, the Iron Curtain, the still perceptible terror of the RAF appear only marginally. In a few places the performers only hit the mental hook; Then when they ask the eternal time travel question: Shouldn’t one have to retrospectively change the past and the view of the future in the knowledge of the present? Shouldn’t one have been sitting outside with a “school strike for the climate” poster back then? Shouldn’t you have taken down the Michael Jackson poster, knowing that it would be canceled anyway? In short: Could it have been better today?
The German-British collective Gob Squad was most recently with “Show Me a Good Time “on the way and invited to the theater meeting, a twelve-hour online show where you could follow the performers during interviews and walks through empty theaters and streets. A comfortingly original format that hit the mood of the audience exhausted by the pandemic. With “1984: Back to No Future” the collective once again demonstrated a keen sense of the issues that drive people and that definitely belong in the theater. And they prove how quickly the theater can react if it wants to. However, Gob Squad only demonstrate the desire for escapism here. They neither enrich it mentally, nor do they celebrate it with relish. “Sweet Dreams” from the Eurythmics is regulated down much too quickly for something like exuberance to arise.
As cathartic as looking back into the deepest corners of the heart may be for the individual, it is of little interest to a larger audience. Gob Squad does not succeed here, which they usually do elegantly, namely to make something big out of the small. “1984: Back to No Future” is 90 minutes of nice entertainment.