After all, the fighting spirit and the joy of energetic slogans are unbroken. During the final applause of Oliver Frljić’s production of “Mother Courage” at the Maxim Gorki Theater in Berlin, the actresses unfurl a banner and shout “Jin Jiyan Azadi!” – Women, Life, Freedom. It is the slogan with which angry and desperate demonstrators in Iran took to the streets against the mullah regime after the death of a young woman in police custody, Mahsa Amini. On a Berlin theater stage, this is a gesture of solidarity and at the same time a somewhat cheap free courage to decorate a production that is at best half-successful. For a moment one fears that the actresses will also sing the old demo hit and “High! The! International! Solidarity!” chant Slogan rhetoric always includes the courage to be a bit dull.
That describes exactly the situation of the theater in the ninth year of Shermin Langhoff’s directorship, whose contract was recently extended to 2026. The self-imposed order or, to put it less charmingly, the carefully cultivated label always includes not only the theater but also the contribution to the international freedom and class struggle, often brutally and without unnecessary subtleties. This suits Oliver Frljić’s staging of the Brecht play insofar as it is also rather striking. It is not the very best work of this quite important Croatian director, who joins the Gorki management team as artistic co-director and chief director from this season on. Frljić, a friendly, clever man, could be the ideal addition to the battle-hardened artistic director, who was exposed to unfairly jazzed-up allegations of abuse of power because of her occasionally harsh behavior in the past season.
The current wars are present in the theater through the life stories of the Gorky artists
If you talk to Langhoff about the situation at her theater, she tells nothing but great, touching, encouraging things from the inner life of Gorki – for example about a young Kurdish artist, Artist in Residence at Gorki, who witnessed the death of Mahsa Amini in the prison of the Iranian moral police answered with an unmistakable art action. She cut off her hair, saved her menstrual blood and smeared it all with henna on the gate of the Iranian embassy: Take that, mullah murderer. The longer one listens to Langhoff, how the current wars and violent regimes in Syria, in Turkey, in the Middle East, in the post-Soviet region are present in the theater simply through the life stories of the Gorki artists, the better one understands the urgency and often quite stunning courage to face life, with which theater is made here. The day after the interview, a friendly email arrives from the director: she does not want to release a single sentence of the long interview for publication. This somewhat laborious need for control may also be part of the Gorki truth. That’s a bit petty, but of course it doesn’t change the fact that you can’t help but look at this amazing and very special theater again and again with admiration and affection.
But as is the case with love for the theater – sometimes it is put to the test. In his “Mother Courage” production, Frljić chews on exactly two and a half fairly banal ideas: War knows no individual fates, so all six actresses take turns taking on the courage figure. At least half of the victims of the war are women, so Frljić casts his production exclusively with actresses, among whom Abak Safaei-Rad and Çiğdem Teke stand out in particular. War produces no truths, not even in the form of Brecht parable mnemonics, it just produces lots of corpses. So Mother Courage’s iconographic sutler’s float becomes a procession of coffins on which emaciated starving corpses lie. These dolls of horror later piled up in piles of corpses at the edge of the stage and on the revolving stage, they dangled like a rain of death from the stage sky.
The coffins are pushed together to form a catwalk, a catwalk for a war cripple fashion show. The musician Daniel Regenberg mixes the recording of Helene Weigel’s voice as Courage from the famous Brecht production of the piece with an apocalyptic electro sound collage that comes straight from hell. These are the most impressive scenes of the short evening, the rest is declamation and slogans theater of the coarser kind, in which only text suppliers, but no figures, let alone characters, are visible, of something old-fashioned like inner sympathy or a shock in the face of war not to mention.