The future is no longer what it used to be. Because of progress intelligence! In the new piece by Philipp Löhle, the person of tomorrow is completely stupid. His IQ decreased as he outsourced independent thinking to his high-tech equipment. He can only distinguish between animals and name things with the help of his smartphone. Which is why it is immediately noticeable when man no. 27 picks up a book, really a thing with pages. It’s just an old cookbook, though. But too late. Two agents are already there and lead him away. 27 is now considered an intelligence beast and is used for reproductive purposes to maintain a reasonably thinkable species.
The world is in a bad way, that’s why the theater, this oldest water level indicator and crisis guide, has its hands full right now. With a view to the climate catastrophe, social change, the possibilities of digitization and artificial intelligence, the future is being rehearsed everywhere on the stages, and there is a replenishment of new pieces at the tipping height of the time.
In general, the theater has a hard time with science fiction material, the cinema is way ahead of it
“Beginning and End of the Anthropocene” by Phillip Löhle is such a piece. The title sounds more dystopian than the text comes along with humor. Löhle, in-house author at the Staatstheater Nürnberg, where his play was premiered, remains true to his reputation as a comedy drama writer. A lot of it is funny and well invented, but only a little hurts – here -. It only hurts the excessive stupidity with too much screaming that the director Jens-Daniel Herzog puts on on stage. It is his first acting direction since taking office in 2018. Most recently he only staged operas. You can see that on this evening, which lacks fine-tuning.
In general, the live genre of theater struggles with science fiction material. The cinema is not only far ahead of it with its visual worlds, it also shapes our imaginations and expectations. On the other hand, a large, sliding plastic frame in the form of a screen, such as that used in Nuremberg as a multifunctional prop for the future world, stinks from time to time (equipment: Mathias Neidhardt); even if the imaginative analog conversion can (could) have a special charm and of course the people of Nuremberg also work with video projections (Karolin Killig). But it always looks a bit like ambitious youth theater and underfunding. When we know the future of directors like Ridley Scott and Christopher Nolan is much higher quality.
When mankind goes for a swim: Anna Klimovitskaya, Nicolas Frederick Djuren, Llewellyn Reichman and Raphael Rubino (from left) in “Beginning and End of the Anthropocene”.
(Photo: Konrad Fersterer)
In terms of content, the theater has more to offer, usually more complex, original, more intellectual and more topical stories and topics than the cinema. In Löhle’s play, for example, it does not stop at the initial future scenario in which humans develop back into primates, which a secret “World Stupidicity Program” is supposed to stop. 27, who is supposed to mate with 42, who is also suspected of residual intelligence, in an institute (and doesn’t even know how to do it), breaks out with her, past a seldom stupid porter. And then they fly away in a self-flying plane. They fly and fly, and suddenly the piece takes a new course. It ends up with the story told by her American uncle John in 42. He lived at a time when America still existed, people still ate meat and drove on gasoline. So present.
It tells how John loses his son and then starts a journey to the Sentinelese, an isolated people in the Andaman Islands. There he indulges his back-to-nature escapism before he, pierced by arrows, ends up in the cooking pot of the savages. Really now? At least that is played out on stage with a lot of chaos and a John (Raphael Rubino) dangling upside down from a rope – until the whole thing, ällabätsch, turns out to be a fake of the indigenous population: So that’s how you think about us?
Shooting nuclear waste into space with rockets? A super bad idea
We fell for old cannibal clichés and Löhle’s feint. And then it goes on in the relay run of this box-narrated text. John meets his dead son in a dream, and this is where those two people come into play who (do not want to) killed the boy on the country road: the Estonian Taivo (Felix Mühlen) and the Dutch woman Svantje (Pauline Kästner) , two scientists on their way to a convention in Georgia. The piece now turns into a love and disaster story. Svantje and Taivo become a couple and develop a method to dispose of nuclear waste by means of rockets in space. At first it was a huge success and then, when a rocket exploded, it was a disaster.
The piece ends with the same scene with which it began, because that is one of Löhle’s key features: that it forms an endless loop. “The piece has been going on forever and it will go on forever,” states the author. Or, as it once said in the text: “As if you look into such a pattern, and in the pattern there is a pattern in which there is a pattern …” Which pattern is here is clear: that, after which man in his mania for feasibility repeatedly causes catastrophes and gets bogged down in a mess. But the urge to tell stories is also such a pattern. Löhle does this in an extravagant way. Only there is a lack of sustainability in terms of impression and effect.
“Lately Wut” by the Austrian author Gerhild Steinbuch has four women the task of deleting problematic pictures from the Internet.
(Photo: Felix Grünschloß)
“In Lately Wut” by the Austrian author Gerhild Steinbuch, born in 1983, is completely different, namely with an explicitly feminist primer. It is a rewriting of the ancient comedy “The Women’s People’s Assembly” by Aristophanes, which premiered at the Schauspiel Frankfurt. In the center: four women, precariously employed at a social media company as content moderators, i.e. cleaners. Your job is to erase problematic pictures, violence, cruelty to animals, penises. Your boss is a smug Horst (Isaak Dentler), who prances sets the tone and explains the world. He also likes to joke: “How do you change a metropolis? – inner city.” A real full eyrie.
The possibility of changing something about male dominance and the current social situation in general comes into play with a kind of smartwatch – a watch that makes it possible to “hack” history, to switch in time, for example to the Amazons or in a utopian “Herland”, and there to change the pictures: “Reboot. Everything at the beginning”. The instructor for this virtual trip is again a man (Uwe Zerwer). He speaks a smart German-English (“my message is universal”) and comes in the good Kehraus direction by Christina Tscharyiski as a personified AI out of a cardboard box. Oh well. Once again, the sci-fi theater looks cheap. The stage is a kind of plenary hall in a wood-paneled semicircle, carpeted floor and rubber tree. Mightest authority impression. And in the emblematic XL costumes, help !, the characters look like service samurais and pierots. Somehow not to be taken seriously.
Abolish the man? Found a women’s state? There is a lot of feminism theory in this discourse-heavy piece, combined with the question of how solidarity are women actually? And who will clean up the dirt in the end? The way Sarah Grunert, Katharina Linder, Melanie Straub and Tanja Merlin Graf work on it remains too tame, too lame. The anger claimed does not sparkle. And in the end one thing in particular scores: Horst.
Avatars in the digital ball pit: Scene from “Hotel Pink Lulu” by Emre Akal, premiered in the disco at the Leipzig Theater.
(Photo: Rolf Arnold)
The play “Hotel Pink Lulu” by the Munich-based author Emre Akal leads completely into a digital substitute world. It was premiered on Theater Leipzig, where no gaming is currently taking place due to the pandemic. Which adds up bitterly insofar as Akal also suggests a kind of eternal lockdown, in which the state has set up a “virtual reality ark project” to lull the citizens: Here everyone can have their greatest avatar after check-in Live out your wish. Be it lying in a marshmallow bed and feasting without gaining weight, like Claudia from Cologne. Or to dream back to that pistachio farm in Syria where the refugee Najib comes from.
The strange imagination with which the director Pia Richter relocated this VR world in a ball pit with three pools and a slide has its charms (stage and funny costumes: Julia Nussbaumer). Lulu 6.0 acts as a digital hostess, who is constantly learning as AI, amazed at “this human biomass”. In Leipzig they are available in two versions with pink suspenders, nicely played human-robotically by Annett Sawallisch and Thomas Braungardt. When Lulu develops feelings, she is discarded. Because of course the supposed land of milk and honey shows, as in every real sci-fi horror, also nightmare parades. The system behind it turns out to be exploitative, elitist and evil. It doesn’t even let the cashier Fatma (the most touching figure, played by Christoph Müller) in – and no longer let others out into the analog world.
Emre Akal uses a lot of stereotypes and tears up a bunch of topics from transgender and bodyshaming to war, migration and criticism of capitalism, not in favor of figure drawing. But there is a great longing for analog humanity in his piece. And that is exactly what theater has ahead of other media: analog humanity.