Felicia Zeller is a vicious writer, and that’s totally meant as a compliment. The playwright looks at her theatrical characters with a certain pity, as if marveling at the strange characters that populate the present. They have made themselves comfortable in their neglect of prosperity, nothing but supple or confused opportunists, people like merrily shimmering zeitgeist soap bubbles with a spiritual vacuum behind the scratched-up theater of self-portrayal.
Of course, everyone considers themselves to be a particularly exceptional individual with an exquisite inner workings. In Zeller’s plays, one can see the mendacious and highly embarrassing sides of the famous “Society of Singularities”, which the sociologist Andreas Reckwitz described as the terminal cultural moraine of late capitalism. It’s not a pretty sight, but it’s quite a funny one.
Now she has brought the characters from Gerhart Hauptmann’s small family drama “Lonely People” from the end of the 19th century to Berlin’s hipster present. Bettina Bruinier’s world premiere in the Neues Haus, the small stage of the Berliner Ensemble, follows Zeller’s mocking tone: the narrative, which quickly moves towards the punchlines, is not interested in subtler character studies, but in the gaudy caricature of the characters. And because these characters seem to consist only of self-actualization phrases, their dialogues are actually manic monologues that collide without waiting for an answer, nothing but endless, high-speed repetitions of statements with a swallowed-up sentence.
The animal sociologist rants about “empowerment”, but only revolves around himself
Gerhart (Gerrit Jansen), an intellectual clown in a pink three-piece suit like a mixture of vaudeville figure and late descendant of an extinct bourgeoisie, has been writing his “animal-sociological” doctoral thesis for years, the private scholar as a noble bohemian, the academic career that never took off as a lifelong lie . The fact that the doctoral thesis is somehow about animals living in herds and swarms and their inspiration for the “empowerment” of modern man is funny insofar as the egocentric is primarily concerned with himself.
Unlike in Hauptmann’s play from the century before last, his wife Marie (Sina Martens) is not a self-sacrificing, loving wife who only defines her worth through the man she adores, but a modern woman, heir to a chocolate dynasty and architect in a naturally super-hip architecture firm. It is clear that she also feeds her parasite husband during the baby break. But somehow the new house with a lakeside property in the Berlin area has to be financed, so one floor will be used as a co-working space. And that’s where the trouble begins.
It is not an intellectual student who blows up the unstable marriage monogamy, as with Hauptmann, but the digital nomad Margarete (Nina Bruns). In his need for recognition, she gives poor Gerhart daring thoughts and cravings, but as a social autistic person, she means it literally that all she needs to live is a WiFi connection. Her business acumen is as robust as her sensibility parlando, she even makes a project out of the bird droppings on the window sill: you could market it online as “heavenly fertilizer from the neighborhood”.
The family friend Bölsche (reliably powerful: Oliver Kraushaar) can’t do much with his life either, so he makes himself important as an eco-activist and forest rescuer – but maybe the forest only needs to be saved because the planned highway will reduce the value of the lake property would.
That’s the beauty of the unlived, missed life, it allows one to dream of sheer grandiose possibilities of a more exciting self. One looks with glee at the embarrassing contortions and poorly concealed life disasters of these figures from the bel étage, who easily know how to combine their moral arrogance with complete disinterest in other people.