Natsuko wants a child, but without sex or a relationship. The young woman spends her best years alone in Tokyo, although it remains unclear whether she really doesn’t need the togetherness or is inhibited by a mental illness. The self-isolated also thinks about female role models in Japan. Her tone is consistently naïve and seeks simple answers, which is perhaps a little strange for a budding writer. In Christopher Rüping’s very faithful adaptation of Mieko Kawakami’s novel “Breasts and Eggs”, which was published in German two years ago at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg, the not very profound shyness determines the overall sound of the piece.
For three and a half hours, a small ensemble negotiated a decidedly undramatic text, decidedly undramatic, on the mostly empty stage. The lack of pace, depth and real tragedy quickly raises the question of whether there might be a cultural misunderstanding for the viewer, whose patience is being strained. Rüping’s claim to stage a “specifically Japanese” novel that “is compatible with the all too human” uses two characterizations that immediately set off cliché alarm clocks. But perhaps the director, in contrast to the theater guest, actually knows what “specifically Japanese” and “all too human” means.
Two hundred years of the women’s movement seem to fit on an A4 sheet of paper
In terms of content, “Breasts and Eggs” – a title that sounds like the ordinary copy of a Mario Barth evening, which perhaps explains why the premiere sold extremely poorly – actually contains nothing that hasn’t been around in Germany for decades was discussed in Bravo, RTL and university seminars: the difficulties of puberty in the face of commercial role models, the struggle of single mothers, women’s self-determination over their bodies up to cosmetic surgery, male violence. However, in Rüping’s play these themes are touched on so superficially that the collected emancipation material from two hundred years of the women’s movement would have fit on an A4 page.
So is it the speechlessness that justifies this long, long evening? Now, shame, which Western remote viewers traditionally claim is an intensely socializing factor in Japan, is a rather poignant emotion. In the laconic manner with which Hans Löw, for example, as hostess Makiko, tells an episode from the life of an underage barmaid who was so brutally raped that her jaw broke, but who only wrote a note apologizing for not being there work can come, this sharpness is briefly awakened.
But this episode, too, remains thrown into a permanent improvisation without consequences, which wants this production to look like a rehearsal situation, including the completely undefined content of sack dresses and oversized suits (by Lene Schwind) and the ugly plywood stage parts (by Jonathan Mertz), which are used in Thalia Theaters, where people have been afraid of real stage sets for years, are now and then pushed into the big black hole of this poverty. As a consistent stylistic device, however, the laconic way of speaking, the constantly stepping out of character with a smile, the whoops-easy negotiation of difficult topics only leads to the fact that the material is defused.
One can certainly like them all, the willfully awkward characters in this play, who are meant to represent a distant culture while losing sight of the culture they are playing for. Maike Knirsch, constantly avoiding vagueness, smiling embarrassed, overwhelmed by direct communication, actually only suffers from the fact that her problem was understood immediately. Nils Kahnwald’s appearance as the “king of sperm donors” brings the entertainment factor of a stage pig into the play for a few minutes with the detailed praise of his sperm values, before it sedates again. Oda Thormeyer as a cancer-stricken editor and Julian Greis as an adolescent niece who no longer speaks out of emotional pain complete the gallery of briefly sketched women’s fates with loosely played anecdotes.
Rüping casts two roles with “Japanese expertise” so that the piece does not become a “touristy undertaking”: the choreographer Saori Hala, who performs a very long baby cradle group dance to Abbas’ “Lay All Your Love On Me” and, like the second in Japanese-born actress, Ann Ayano, contributed various supporting roles. However, the guests are less concerned with the authentically foreign, whatever that should have been, and instead reinforce the aspect that all the roles in this play seem too artificially private to be true. So that one would like to agree with the self-critical part of the piece when the editor explains: “Everywhere it is written only about having children, raising children and the joys and suffering associated with it. Terrible! Why this banal stuff? If you only write about private things, you are you, from my point of view, as an author at the end.”