Perhaps the most beautiful story of this evening is that of the hippos. There are actually no hippos in South America. But drug lord Pablo Escobar ran a private zoo in Colombia. After his death, the hippos escaped from here. First there were four, now there are many, and in search of the Nile they have come as far as Paraguay. The six women trying their luck in the royal stables of the Residenztheater, perhaps in Paraguay, Chile or Bavaria, behave in a similarly disoriented manner, if not at all hippopotamus. They won’t find it. Instead crocodiles.
The Chilean author and director Guillermo Calderón wrote his play “Bavaria” on behalf of the Residenztheater and staged it himself A story of not understanding, meandering fibs (is it about Chile or Paraguay now or does that not matter from a German point of view anyway?), and behind everything the memory of the Colonia Dignidad hovers in the background. The sect leader Paul Schäfer founded it in 1961 in nowhere in Chile, raped hundreds of boys there and opened the fortress-like area to the torturers of the Pinochet military dictatorship. In 1991 Schäfer renamed the Colonia “Villa Baviera”, probably as a homage to Franz Josef Strauss – when a play is about strange Germans in Chile, you inevitably think about it.
Calderón invents six women who are a choir and don’t want to be a cult. Sophia Sylvester Röpcke wraps her in ethnoesoteric robes and builds a narrow room full of incense stick insignia around her, Stephen Delaney has rearranged music for her. And so they sing lovely German and Bavarian folk songs, Spanish ones too and some in Guaraní, that’s spoken in Paraguay, Miene Costa yodels from the off. One of the six, the Eva, did (or didn’t) kill her husband in a bizarre way, in any case she now owns six casinos and two diamond mines, and the way Barbara Horvath plays it you can well imagine the late husband’s shops were not very kosher.
So there is money, and with it the six want to go to Paraguay or Chile to build something, found something, also do something well, also flee the Corona vaccination, but maybe they will stay in Bavaria. The attitude of each individual changes randomly, none consistently stands for anything, almost everyone has an outburst from time to time, which is remarkably tiring over the course of the astonishingly long hour and a half.
Even the joke, which was great at first, thins out and loses itself in the approximate, because Calderón wants too much and does too little – the best way to orientate yourself is to look at Barbara Melzl’s wonderfully bone-dry humor. The many allusions, ideas, attitudes, lies form an inextricable tangle that one looks at with clearly diminishing interest. But maybe you just don’t get Chilean theatre.