In retrospect one will say: one spent life between the conference room, waiting area, telephone and the copier corner, within sight of a vending machine with a picture of Katja Ebstein on it to raise the general mood. Life on Lisa Käppler’s stage may be a test version at first, but it does seem pretty real. As true as the 16 songs that are the reason why there is this theater evening “Now or Never” in the Marstall.
Residenztheater ensemble member Max Rothbart directed the play for the first time and, like a fellow actor, gives everyone the opportunity to achieve great singing form. Action? There is also. The audience is greeted by an AI. The kind of thing everyone talks about but no one’s ever seen. Here it is one of those large office copiers that can speak monotonously digitally and likes to print out its answers as a fax – which describes the current status of German digitization quite precisely.
At the beginning, the audience meditates into a prenatal state of happy ignorance, is served life in songs in one and a half hours and can decide whether they want to be born – or rather not. And then it goes as an ensemble number with the enigmatically wise “When a person lives” from the Puhdys going on, which, with its text by Ulrich Plenzdorf and the muddled version of Pachelbel’s bass line, has not been heard for far too long.
Florian Paul, with his Chapel of the Last Hope who makes music here, is working at the Residenztheater for the first time. It sounds like the beginning of a beautiful relationship. The band is always there where the singers need them, acting as a unit without vanity and full of crazy ideas. Like the one that Isabell Antonia Höckel sings with the glamor of a great revue, “There are always miracles”, underlaid with a groove unit of electric bass and bass saxophone.
Outside of their songs, the actors act with the charm of talking service robots, who – happiness, desperation, love, loneliness – announce catchphrase after catchphrase. In combination with costumes and suits that don’t have the latest cut, it often feels as homely as Ilja Richter’s disco. Above all, because one also likes to pull scraped particles out of the humorous box: “Precaution is very important to me.” “Isn’t prevention always a top priority?”
But especially against the background of the flat joke, a song becomes really plastic. Juliane Köhler sweeps the audience away with her presence in the Nina Hagen number “Hatschi Waldera”, which is so silly that she amazes: It is possible to sneeze and love at the same time and in the overall picture to come across astonishingly aggressive. Bandleader Florian Paul remains a musician without acting and thus comes close to death in Reinhard Mey’s “Schade that you must go”: only this barrel-iron voice and the nylon strings of his guitar. Johannes Nussbaum can turn bloody with Konstantin Wecker and with the doctors get the moral one. Life, it’s the sum of all these little things and little insanities. It seems so.
When Vincent Glander celebrates “Mercie Chérie” with the abyss in false pathos, there is suddenly a crack in the record and it crashes smoking – the AI. And with her all the speaking machine actors. Deepest helplessness until someone pulls the plug. And then – quite analogously – the realization: “Somewhere in the world, there’s a little bit of luck”. It has to be like that. songs don’t lie