Of course, a play called “Jeeps” is also about cars. Namely about those eponymous Teuerblechpanzer, which not only shape the streetscape in wealthy Munich, but especially here. Recently, we learn, they have also overcrowded the parking lot in front of the job center. Because there, in waiting hall A, are all those higher daughters and affluent sons who have lost Papa’s fortune in the course of an inheritance reform. Their inheritance has been confiscated by the state and given up for raffle, according to the new law. If you want to apply for a lot, you have to go to the job center, because that’s where the asset lottery is regulated by the authorities, in addition to the unemployment administration. Here they all come together: the poor and those who have been left behind, the dismissed, the disenfranchised and the disinherited. Lots of “Yuppielarven” and “sacrificial sausages”.
The social distribution debate, pinned to a German authority and whirled up as a fast-paced comedy: What the Munich author Nora Abdel-Maksoud achieves in and with her play “Jeeps” has real confidence and a lot of energy. At the premiere in the Munich Kammerspiele, which was still fully occupied, official mail went off on stage in such a way that you had to listen carefully and think along to really understand everything, all the jokes, allusions, puns and punch lines that were going on at an insane pace were cut out. “Jeeps” is a German turbo comedy with all-wheel drive, even intelligent, something that actually doesn’t exist, because we Germans may be good at luxury car construction, but we’re not really good at dramatic humor. (Exceptions like Felicia Zeller, for example with her tax office grotesque “Der Fiskus”, confirm the rule.)
Four formidable actors put on crazy jokes in turbo speech
Nora Abdel-Maksoud has already proven her comedy skills with “Café Populaire” and other plays. As almost always she directs “Jeeps” herself, although she offers a lot less scenically and optically than in terms of content and language, which is almost a bit disappointing. The game is played in front of an envious green wall, which at first you think would open up and reveal a more opulent set. You think. The game remains on the narrow fore stage, leaving out any decorations. Only four box-shaped neon lights point to the dreariness of the authorities and two swing doors to the comedy, in which one or the other can get tangled up, as is typical of the genre. On the right hand side sits the musician Enik, who sets his accents in a beautifully raw, pure way. So far, so barren.
And then: the bright madness, organized by four formidable actors in turbo speech, who have great timing and madness. They form a quartet of punch lines in a furious flash of light: whoever is speaking stands in the cone of light until someone else snaps their finger, and – washed – the light goes off here and there and – snaps – around and back and forth here. Two public officials versus two applicants. Everyone in their beige-brown jackets, turtleneck sweaters and bow-tie blouses, the women with hairdryers, look a bit dizzy from yesterday, as if they came from the late seventies. What Katharina Faltner (stage and costumes) wants to express with this is not explained. But it doesn’t matter. The linguistic joke is of today, with amusing reminiscences of the grimace and word ping-pong comedy of Louis de Funès (who in turn is from the 1970s).
Clerk Gabor (Vincent Redetzki, left) loves his Mercedes G 400d – and forms. He doesn’t want to be provoked by Silke (Gro Swantje Kohlhof, right).
(Photo: Armin Smailovic)
In the job center, Armin (Stefan Merki) and Gabor (Vincent Redetzki) are doing their job, one of them pretending to be an authority sunboy and long-time mansplainer, the other, in all his honesty, is the incorruptible on duty. He knows neither humor nor pity and even deducts poor Maude’s deposit from the basic security, because collecting bottles is considered an “independent activity”. This maude, an impoverished noblewoman with a proud residual grandezza (very fine: Eva Bay), was once successful as a dime novelist. Now she suffers from a bizarre word-finding disorder and, as a long-term Hartz IV recipient, is the regular guest-eccentric “Countess Schizo” of the office with a standard rate of just 4.86 euros for food and non-alcoholic drinks per day. In any case, she knows all the tricks and also Mister Unbrechlich’s Achilles heel, namely his off-road vehicle, a Mercedes G 400d. She takes advantage of this together with the young entrepreneur Silke Eggerts in an extortionate act of attack – with gun at gunpoint and remote detonator in hand. A situation that soon escalated.
With this lottery you can inherit money – or debts
In this literally crazy satire of classism, Silke, played by Gro Swantje Kohlhof with a highly distressed panic of impoverishment, represents the generation of the newly disinherited. She was lucky in the “Ovarian Lottery” at birth, she comes from one of those rich families who inherit up to 400 billion euros in Germany every year. On the other hand, you also learn that in the play, every fifth child is poor. Silke founded the start-up “Laptops in Lederhosen”, but she doesn’t feel rich, no, rich, just like all the disinherited Konstantins who have meanwhile “gentrified” the waiting hall of the job center and put a food truck and a bouldering hall in it. With criminal comedy energy, Silke is now blackmailing a ticket for the fortune lottery. But bad luck: it pulls a rivet. One can also inherit debt.
It tears how the text jumps back and forth between flashbacks, dialogues, narrative and explanatory passages and the actors implement it with bad humor and fine slapstick. That is not only high, but sometimes over-revving. Actually, the laugh should get stuck in your throat in view of the facts. But it doesn’t.