Prenzlauer Berg last looked so much like a promise of great freedom and a wild life a good 30 years ago, shortly after the fall of the Wall, when the Berlin district was a big adventure playground and not yet the thoroughly gentrified prosperity bullerby of today. A couple of high-spirited weirdos with sunglasses and adventurous clothes storm across the pavement, they play by their own rules and engage in funny chases with a clumsy patrolman (Detlev Buck) and a pimp (Leander Haussmann). They don’t care about the reality of the supposedly normal and grown-up, the world out there is for having fun. And these life-hungry anarchists get their fun, they need it badly after the locked time in the psychiatric ward with their pills and electric shocks and humiliations.
The short film of the escape through Prenzlauer Berg is the fast-paced finale of Leander Haussmann’s theater production “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”. Ken Kesey’s anti-psychiatric novel became a hippie bible in the 1960s, Miloš Forman’s 1975 film adaptation with Jack Nicholson was what was then called a cult film – and every recalcitrant, long-haired 17-year-old from the provinces discovered years later in the defiant psychiatric prisoners brothers in spirit.
The prison doctor believes he is the only normal person on the stage
Leander Haussmann can choose his actors, so for the theatrical production of the novel he just used the best he could get. He found them in the inclusive Berlin Theater Rambazamba, whose actors also play according to their own rules on stage and in life – and only those who don’t look closely and have a heart of cement would therefore call them “disabled” or “differently gifted” and “handicapped”. The psychiatric ward on the stage is exquisitely desolate, even if the doctor in the white coat assures us that the atrocities of the past no longer exist here. The prison doctor (guest: Norbert Stöß) is the only normal person on stage, he believes, but of course the other inmates see through him: “You’re one of us.” Which would serve the joke about the lunatic who thinks he’s the psychiatrist – but what can you say, Haussmann and the actors are in such a good mood and skilfully having fun that even the oldest psychiatric joke in the world is good for a laugh.
In the closed you need strong nerves: Nele Winkler, Norbert Stöß and Franziska Kleinert as psychiatric hospital staff in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.
(Photo: Andi Weiland)
In addition to two slightly sadistic nurses (Franziska Kleinert and Nele Winkler), the station’s crew includes some long-term inmates, Dirk for example (Dirk Nadler): “Dirk is a universe of secrets that we never know,” the others know about him. Or the disturbed boy who cuts his arms after every visit from his mother because he couldn’t stand it any other way (Anil Merickan). Or the mute giant who stoically makes his rounds with his broom (Christian Behrend). Or the man who has at least two personalities and crawls into the endless loops of his sentences: “I’m tired, I’m tired, are you afraid, you’re not afraid” (Sebastian Urbanski). Enter: newcomer to the station, McMurphy (Jonas Sippel). The lettering on his shirt, “Unique”, doesn’t promise too much. First of all, this rather unique individual does a dance, as if with every move he makes, he wants to celebrate and hold on and enjoy life, even in this ugly place. McMurphy comes out of prison, maybe he only simulates the illness for the psychiatric stay in order not to have to work in jail – in any case his obstinacy for the disciplinary regime of the institution is a dangerous defect, the man needs to be broken.
Jonas Sippel has been in the Rambazamba ensemble for ten years, a full professional who takes the stage and makes McMurphy shine with his courage. He turns the gestures of refusal and defiance into great slapstick cinema, for example when he makes it very amusingly clear who is in charge from now on when he puts on the prison clothes. When he has to take off his boots, he smells the footbed with pleasure – and then holds the shoe as close as possible to the nursing staff’s nose: Take that!
Haussmann and the Rambazamba actors turn Ken Kesey’s psychiatric novel (adapted for the stage by Dale Wasserman) into an incredibly charming and philanthropic evening, which is also kept in a good mood by the band’s very relaxed musicians ghosts. In the playful lightness, it seems like the staging of a very young, very talented director who has a bright future ahead of him and from whom you absolutely want to see more.