Nora Abdel-Maksoud knows how current debates, blatant injustice, self-righteous idiocy and other outrageous capitalism can be transformed into funny bang effects on stage. Abuses of all kinds and unbridled stupidity are the raw materials that the aggressive author, actress and director uses for her clever plays. With wit and good humour, she creates nothing but beautiful things from it: enlightenment, art, fun and slaps in the face for the existing conditions and the dorks who make themselves comfortable in the misery of other people.
Nora Abdel-Maksoud is apparently a theater alchemist who, pardon me, turns shit into gold. She knows how to make petrified relationships dance by playing her own weird tune, to use the beautiful words that Karl Marx used to describe the task of ideological criticism. It is logical that with the explosive mixture of entertainment, anger and class consciousness, it fits in perfectly with the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin. A decade ago, she launched her attacks on real misery with her first plays in the small Ballhaus Naunynstraße in Kreuzberg, the off-theatre that Shermin Langhoff invented before she became Gorki’s artistic director.
The talked-about opinion business is just as much a topic as anonymous burials in mass graves
Nora Abdel-Maksoud staged the premiere of her new play herself on the Gorki stage. It’s called “discount” and includes several unreasonable demands. First: the babbled-on opinion business, in which social criticism becomes a sellable talk show commodity. Second: the inevitable children from good families who are either envied or hated in Berlin’s creative precariat, who play with their inheritance for self-realization, use left-wing phrases as sentimental perfume for ego refinement and otherwise spoil the housing market with their condominiums. The third topic is not so funny: the scandal that poor people are anonymously buried in mass graves by the authorities.
Knowing how: Since the journalist Dena (Orit Nahmias) has been opening “opinion corridors”, business has been going well.
(Photo: Lutz Knospe)
The journalist Dena (Orit Nahmias) is responsible for topic one, the career in the opinion business and talk show chatter. That she is a columnist “on Deutschland-Erwache.de, World and time” outed, is probably a small greeting to the poet and thinker Harald Martenstein. She does not know exactly what “left fascism” is supposed to be, but since she has been talking about it at every opportunity and says something about “opinion corridors” when necessary, they are running Business. It’s finally worth talking nonsense as a woman with a migration background! It’s so worthwhile that Dena can afford an assistant (Aysima Ergün) whose job is, above all, to be snapped at. Anyone who wants to can understand that as a little nod to the Gorki director Langhoff, who is famous for her freaks out.
The fact that the sushi delivery boy (Taner Sahintürk) suffers a heart attack in Dena’s loft serves as a transition to the genre change towards trash. Suddenly, Dena and her assistant end up working for two cowboys and funeral directors from welfare state hell (Falilou Seck and Niels Bormann). They have made their fortunes burying the poor in cheap urns and mass graves made of plastic drainpipes – “we call it a social plastic”. Because the brothers bribe half the village with the millions from the poor corpse disposal business, their dump has become so rich that nobody wants to do the dirty work anymore. The human remains and other things stink to high heaven! Then it gets a bit confusing, the punchline density drops to floor level. One notices the show a little too clearly that the action on stage is mainly driven by the question of how the remaining 40 minutes can be filled in order to get halfway to feature film length. The performance style in The Blue Box (Stage: Moira Gilliéron) is more frontal comedy than theatre, but it is intelligent comedy nonetheless.