“Servant of two masters” at the Berliner Ensemble: Wild joke westerns – culture

Of course, you can argue about gender theories for a long time and in seminars you can worry about whether gender is a biological or perhaps a social fact. It is more fun to watch how the director Antú Romero Nunes at the Berliner Ensemble turns these steep theses and the observation that men are unfortunately rather ridiculous beings into a very cheerful evening at the theater. Nunes moves Goldoni’s Comedia dell’arte comedy “The Servant of Two Masters” from the 18th century Italian fair theater to the Wild West, albeit in a West populated by comic characters: High Nunes. So that it sounds funnier, and because not so many Berliners rode through the steppe in the Wild West, a squeaky pidgin English is spoken on stage: “Now we have the salad.”

Here perfectly shaped grease becomes higher art

The director uses the fact that in Carlo Goldoni’s Comedia dell’arte classic a woman dresses up as a man as an opportunity to push the gender swap games a little further. He leaves all the characters to a completely female top-class ensemble. Without exaggeration it can be said: The director throws the tough guys up to the actresses to eat, until not only the individual cowboys, but their entire sex is little more than a played joke – albeit an excellently played joke. The type arsenal of the Western proves to be extremely productive for gender stereotypes and the badger poses of taciturn men in advanced stages of neglect. No way, gender is a social construction, here it is more of an anti-social imposition. The toxic masculinity in the end stage with tooth loss, pronounced overbite, thinning hair and the determined courage to be ugly is not an uplifting sight (costumes: Lena Schön, Helen Stein). If there is an acting equivalent for old man’s sweat and bad breath – it should look like this.

With her belly belted on, Judith Engel turns the saloon host Hank into a grumbling counter cowboy with hanging shoulders and a gloomy look. The great Cynthia Micas changes from tough westerner Willie Jay to his daughter, who is decidedly clearer in her head than her trigger-happy father. Constanze Becker plays the dead Kayden, Kayden’s sister, who plays the dead Kayden, and her lover Brody – but what she mainly plays is that being a tester is great fun if you don’t make the mistake of taking it seriously. The force of nature Stefanie Reinsperger, as the eternally hungry servant of many masters, calls the little toy lamb that she pulls behind her “quite a stage pig”, but nobody has to explain to this actress what a rampage pig is. Nunes agreeably dispenses with the public instruction, which makes the theater difficult to bear. Instead, he does something completely old-fashioned: He trusts in the pure joy of playing and does the good old theatrical tricks of a rapid mix-up and disguise comedy with great actresses in orbits in which the perfectly shaped goo becomes higher art.