If you took away people’s cell phones, you would probably soon get a mood like “Krum”. A tough boredom paired with the reluctance to seriously overcome one’s own lack of drive. Then they would sit around and really only know what they don’t want. Relationship, eating, drinking, wanderlust: people used to get bored with each other, even if they were crouching on a beach with sunset. They lacked something on top of everything. And that avenged itself with chronic dissatisfaction and the refusal of recognition.
At least that’s how the world looks with Hanoch Levin, who wrote his play “Krum” in 1975, at a time when digital media addiction was not even invented in science fiction novels. Now the neighborhood play by the author and director, famous in Israel and hardly known in Europe, about “two weddings and two funerals” had its German premiere very late in the Hamburg Thalia Theater. It’s a comedy about the tragedy of living an uncomfortable life. Krum, the main character, still has an idea of being different. But it is to write a great novel for which his friends in the district should provide the material. But where there is no material, there is no novel. And because that was clear from the start, Krum’s otherness is just a slightly more arrogant form of self-deception.
The silent man with the cool box is the only one who makes a decision – or does he?
Sounds insanely boring, but it’s not. Because Levin’s ironic tone, his loving look at the high tolerance of people who strive for the status of a life without threatening changes, results in a fine satire of monotony – which is not monotonous. And the relocation of the scenery from a residential area in need of renovation to a sandy beach with a boulder, which Stéphane Laimé designed for director Kornél Mundruczó, gives the vacation a very fitting picture of all the demands that these ordinary people have as a lifestyle. Monotonous beach holidays without digital dementia. This leads to controversial scenes in which the dream of the end of uneventfulness appears briefly.
It is a sense of senseless reproach that Levin invents in his short scenes about the good citizens. What can one say about a mother who energetically demands attentions and a grandson from her son, even though she is content with her television alone? About young unattractive people who just want to get married and inventing diseases to get attention? Or about a pair of old booze thrushes whose only subject is gossip about food at neighborhood weddings? It takes actors and actresses who can tease comedy out of poor characters without betraying their dignity. Fortunately, there are a few of these at the Thalia Theater. And the film and theater director Mundruczó knows how to use them in a cinematic way with a view to changing light and weather moods by the sea. Although everyone only wears black bathing suits, and some of them sometimes nothing at all.
In this popular beach Chekhov with rubber sandals (costumes: Sophie Klenk-Wulff), Ole Lagerpusch is the sad asshole Krum. A 38-year-old youth who lets everyone feel who is the only one special in the dreary area. This rather hollow version of a James Dean in a hoodie torments the pretty Truda with nasty tips about her ordinaryness and about accepting and rejecting her wedding. Maja Schöne counters this constant humiliation in her game with an admirably defiant struggle for self-respect, which nevertheless ends unhappily and pregnant with the substitute, the funny, rumbling simpleton Tachtich (Bernd Grawert).
There are actually no real minor characters among these eleven who remained seated in Ambition. Karin Neuhäuser and Oda Thormeyer, the dissatisfied couple Dolce and Felicia, are responsible for the department “Eating, drinking, neighborhood gossip” and brilliantly perform this anti-social task with rough indecency and ridicule. The conceited sick Tugati, who unfortunately dies of a brain tumor exactly when he was at the goal with his suffering simulation and got married, experiences with Stefan Stern the quite comical thinning of character into miserable. And the silent role of Silenti (all names have a character-typical meaning) is wonderfully lifted with Tim Porath, as he is always there with a cool box and foaming beer cans without ever really participating. But in the end the only one who makes a decision: to get away from this boredom. Or not?
Kornél Mundruczó, who most recently attracted international attention with his film “Pieces of a Woman” with Vanessa Kirby, who won the Actress Award at the Venice Film Festival, has achieved a silent triumph of humor with this play. His comical portrait of a stationary miniature society is staged in such a moving way that it never creates the longing for a glance at the cell phone.