At the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the season begins with forest fires, tick bites, floods, an infant strangled by a giant snake, ship sinkings, the deserved crash of European civilization and the inevitable downfall of humanity. Nature strikes back, revenge for them Devastation of the Anthropocene is due, the extinction of the species is finally reaching Homo sapiens.
And now the bad news: Unfortunately, these world endings are being brought about in two pathetically superficial productions. Also an opportunity to give the avant-garde: humanity is destroying itself, the theater is already leading the way.
:How nice, the apocalypse is here
The water is rising in Florida, the forests are burning in California. But TC Boyle’s novel “Blue Skies” still doesn’t scare the climate catastrophe.
The director Anna Bergmann didn’t necessarily do herself or the theater any favors by trying to use her To somehow save the Fellini adaptation “The Ship of Dreams (just keeps going)”, which was started by fellow director Claudia Bauer and then stopped due to illness. In the DT Chamber Games, Alexander Eisenach, who gave the Deutsches Theater an embarrassing demonstration of prepotence last season with “Weltall Erde Mensch”, serves up a rather misty stage version of TC Boyle’s eco-catastrophe novel “Blue Skies”. The involuntary point of both events is, of course, that they themselves are the best examples of the decadence of the Western capitalist way of life that they so extensively complain about.
Terror and lamentation are merely flavor enhancers
The senseless waste of valuable resources (for example the audience’s lifetime), the narcissistic circles around one’s own well-being, the ennui bolstered by wealth – all of this can be seen here. It’s not a pretty sight. The mixture of mental confusion, pretense of meaning and freewheeling artistic crafts creates a dismal cocktail. The horrors of the ecological catastrophe and the complaint about Europe’s moral bankruptcy are used as a kind of flavor enhancer over nothing but empty theatrical resources: nonsense with cultural pessimistic sauce.
The first of the two productions uses Federico Fellini’s film “Ship of Dreams” as a template to illustrate a decadent party society that joylessly celebrates its way to nirvana. The idea is not entirely new. Karin Baier used the film a few years ago to contrast the luxury cruiser of European high society with the refugee boats in the Mediterranean. This production was quite problematic in its unreflective handling of racist stereotypes. This time too, the reference to the refugees’ boats in the Mediterranean is not missing, even if it is added to the performance at the very end rather randomly and as if as a demonstration of sentiment: We have to quickly get this topic over with.
Because in Fellini’s film an opera diva is given her last escort and the journey on the dream ship becomes a trip to Hades, at least for the faded singer, the morbid party at the Deutsches Theater turns into a parade of excited opera eccentrics on the way to ruin. Piled up hairstyles, dancing in high heels, abused vocal cords, opera arias and vanities of all kinds, self-doubt and intrigue on the lower deck – there is no lack of exaltation. This old European world is perishing by singing. The parade of shrillness is tiring, despite Anja Schneider as the show’s emcee, despite Anastasia Gubareva and the fearless grotesque tenor Hubert Wild, despite the pretty nice background music. Whispering texts about the “end of an era” and self-absorbed confessions of failure (“we didn’t make it, we failed”) don’t make it any better. The tired final punch line belongs to a hippopotamus and a vulture, sometime in the future: “Do you still remember the people?” – “Grrrrmmmhhh…” Well, yes.
Alexander Eisenach’s adaptation of the novel “Blue Skies” is similarly confused and its scenic means are as impressive as it is arbitrary: more atmospheric fog than narrative, commercial psychedelics in constant use on the revolving stage (stage: Daniel Wollenzin). The end times party is also celebrated here with veil dances in the harsh white backlight, while Florida sinks into the sea and California burns. No matter, the staff is fueled by countless drinks, afternoon cocktails, after-work beers and relaxing red wines, so mental clarity is not to be feared.
To save the planet, Californian prosperity hippies are switching their diet to tacos made from insect meal and putting breeding boxes in their kitchens for their crickets. A twisted influencer gets a tiger python to enhance her personality and combat boredom (Mareike Beykirch), her wide-legged cowboy hat-wearing husband (Jeremy Mockridge) earns his money as a Bacardi promoter, his pride and joy is his new Tesla. They’re all cliche characters, and that’s what they’re supposed to be: a type parade instead of psychology.
The half-baked start to the new season follows seamlessly on from the weak previous season
They heartily wish that the floods in Florida wash away their cars, that their houses are destroyed by mold and woodworms and that their wine tastes like ash thanks to the constant forest fires in California, which has dried up into a desert. While all the destructive forces of nature in Boyle’s satirical novel bombard his characters quite strikingly, in Eisenach’s production they are merely comic-like warning signs, entertainment ingredients that invite pleasant shudders.
It can happen that a season begins with two half-baked productions. But at the Deutsches Theater, this season opener seamlessly follows on from the previous season in an uneasy way with the unpleasant combination of clumsy messages (yes, climate change is really happening) with equally clumsy aesthetic means. The director Iris Laufenberg, who has been running the theater since last season, only managed a very mixed program in her first year in Berlin. The numerous takeovers from Graz, their former place of work, seem somewhat helpless and provincial here. The ensemble remains relatively pale in comparison to the other capital city stages.
:Dangerously in the red
Despite generous subsidies, the Deutsches Theater in Berlin apparently has a massive money problem. And now?
Individual highlights such as the Rainald Goetz premiere “Baracke”, Claudia Bauer’s furious Dada show “Ursonate”, Anita Vulesica’s white-collar farce “The Salary Increase” or Anne Lenk’s clever “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” have too many complete crashes on the balance sheet like Eisenach’s “space” disaster. Other things are sufficient in a striking demonstration of attitude. Last season’s occupancy rate of 75 percent in the big house is not a warning sign, but it is not overwhelming either. With a total of around 150,000 visitors, the Deutsches Theater had around 40,000 fewer visitors on a budget of 30 million euros than, for example, the much smaller, artistically much more brilliant Berliner Ensemble, which gets by with a third less subsidies.
That at the Deutsches Theater, even if through no fault of the director, A deficit of millions has accrued and the fact that the dismissal of the long-time managing director without notice was so legally improper that the theater had to pay him a high severance payment does not make the situation any more comfortable. To put it very politely: There is still some room for improvement.