There are professions in which mistakes are particularly fatal. A surgeon, for example, or a national soccer goalkeeper. It’s also extremely unpleasant when things get out of hand in a funeral home, because it quickly becomes very irreverent. Marieke, an employee at a company called Hibernatus, faces such a problem in Nina Meyer and Felix Engstfeld’s radio play Algor Mortis. brain freeze.
Now those responsible at Hibernatus are doing almost everything to ensure that the company does not appear to be a funeral home. Instead, they take advantage of the fact that there is a clientele that firmly believes in life after death. Not in a metaphysical sense, but in a rational-biological sense. They see cryonics, i.e. the preservation of bodies at extremely low temperatures, as a way of being able to reawaken these bodies in the future, no matter how far away in time this may be.
The minimum requirement for this is, of course, that a body remains intact as much as possible. However, Marieke read the contract with Udo Wütrich sloppily and therefore only cryonized his head. Now his family is on the mat – the widow Isolde, the adult children Alex and Xander and the 14-year-old latecomer Urmel. As expected, they are extremely upset, because firstly, according to the Wütrichs, it is about the principle and secondly also about Udo, because what kind of future does a head without a body have?
Besides, the Wütrichs don’t believe that the head of the family, of whom only the head still exists, is actually dead, so they accuse Marieke of murder. And so in this radio play comedy a wild dialogue battle takes off, which is fought on two levels. On the one hand, this morbid farce is about the big field of rampant hostility to science, about the denial of facts as soon as they don’t fit into one’s own worldview.
On the other hand, it breaks down into Algor Mortis a family into its individual parts. Because their members face each other in heartfelt enmity and now see the moment has come to settle the many outstanding scores. Marieke cleverly uses this to perfidiously shift the responsibility for her mistake onto her relatives. With whom she at least has one thing in common: decency is not a relevant category of trade for anyone in this comedy.
Algor Mortis. brain freezeWDR 5, September 10, 2023, 5:04 p.m.