Sven Kemmler begins his new solo “Paradise Lost – The Future of Democracy” in the Lustspielhaus with a kind of leaflet: The artist rejects responsibility for the side effects of his – “climate-neutral” – program and distances himself from world history. Not a bad trick to take the pressure off the dauntingly large and pressingly topical issue that he later admitted “took him more work than any program before.” The outsider’s view of what you’re in the middle of has given him a big hit: “Paradise Lost” easily makes it into the imaginary top ten programs that have ever explicitly dealt with the topic of freedom and democracy.
This begins with the linguistic definition of terms, which has always been a great strength of the word, sentence and grammar forge Kemmler. Whether it’s the very topical war euphemism – if “attack” is in front of it, it’s particularly bad, as “operation” or “mission” there is, so to speak, no alternative – whether the insanity of the identitarian language and thinking, exposed in a famous “Charlotte Shatterhand and Wilfried Winnetou” sketch. In any case, after the break, one climax follows another: from the “Issey Miyake fragrance tree ‘Education'”, which makes Nietzsche’s enslaved Uber-man superman with the “Scent of Enlightenment”, to a diaphragmatic “Moby-Dick” adaptation to to the stages of the developing country “Dolphien” on the way to recognized pseudo-democracy.
Kemmler not only offers analysis and criticism, but also – a rarity in cabaret – proposed solutions: the radical shortening and raffling of offices against corruption by power, practiced politeness against social divisions. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen something smarter and funnier about the open society and its enemies (to paraphrase Popper) on a cabaret stage.