Brexit is complete, the United Kingdom has a techno-totalitarian system, with total surveillance up to and including the KI toilet that checks the urine-base balance, good behavior that is rewarded with social points, misconduct that is punished with the deprivation of essentials. Two irradiated, permanently happy figures in sky blue, represented by Gabriela Maria Schmeide and Tim Porath, report via live stream on a rotating LED screen of a time when everyone was so overwhelmed by the frenzied technical changes, the erosion of certainties and the ever increasing gaping social divisions that they finally made corrupt idiots their democratically elected heads of state and thus sealed the end of their own freedom.
“GRM Brainfuck”, a co-production with the Hamburg Thalia Theater, is a world premiere and concludes the touring festival “Theater der Welt”. This year’s edition took place at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and for the first time focused on the field of youth theater. It is not easy to determine to what extent the adaptation of the Sibylle Berg novel of the same name, which was awarded the Swiss Book Prize and directed by Sebastian Nübling, is primarily aimed at a young audience. The culturally pessimistic basic tone of the whole thing, which is dressed in snottiness and armored irony (that already starts with the subtitle “The so-called musical”) seems at least middle-aged.
Generation Z that digital native, Among other things, people who cannot concentrate for more than two minutes have “learned everything they know online”. Does that mean: Internet makes you stupid? Or is that irony too? The core problem of the production, which is not even two hours long, is that the answer to such subtle questions remains as indifferent as the largely de-individualized characters.
The present has if not overtaken Sibylle Berg’s dystopia, at least complemented it
The six impoverished, marginalized young protagonists who refuse to “take their designated place as scraps” see the piece almost only from above. In one passage alone, which is by far the most interesting, individual characters break away from the group, hijack the LED screen temporarily and tell of their story as a Polish immigrant child or as an ex-nerdy who brought her beautiful but somewhat stupid friend to the bottle Has.
The themes of the novel – themes that Sibylle Berg has repeatedly taken up – have been retained: data overload, threats from artificial intelligence and a market freedom that only serves to “watch the rich be free”. The currently extremely popular trick of making the near future – in this case England – the scene for contemporary criticism has also been preserved (see “Black Mirror”, “Westworld” etc.).
However, the novel was published in April 2019. There was still a dispute about Brexit, as if something could still be changed, and for most people “pandemic” was the name of a parlor game. This means that the present has if not overtaken the fictional future shown here, at least supplemented it with elements that are now noticeably missing in the gloomy inventory.
Berg’s language longs for lightness, but seems strangely inhibited
Sebastian Nübling remains true to his stylistic device of choral speaking. It turns the young people, who can be clearly differentiated in the original, into a kind of unstable, angry, dancing, cellphone-typing fundamental opposition, whose revolutionary furor, however, is nowhere near. The world of disinformation, in which all of this nominally takes place, is symbolized by images like that of a donut, the healthy nutritional value of which is touted. Even a George Orwell quote sneaks in briefly, giant screen eyes as a Big Brother observation instrument. At times, however, you almost wish for George Orwell’s 1984 vision of the future of a boot that incessantly stamps on a face – just so that something happens.
The fact that the whole thing is underlaid with a grime soundtrack supplied by the London-based Ruff Sqwads Arts Foundation, that the young actors in the balloon-silk precarious look declaim and wriggle their hearts out, only underlines the honesty of the whole thing. Berg’s language clearly longs to get rid of the heaviness, the German equivalent of urban English street cred to be, with their interspersed “What the fucks” seems only strangely inhibited.
The writer and columnist Sibylle Berg.
(Photo: Katharina Lütscher / Kiepenheuer & Witsch)
Of course, a piece that is so self-conscious of itself inevitably addresses dystopia, which it supposedly doesn’t want to be: “Dystopia has been the thing of the last few years!” Say the choir speakers. But this is real, “The Walking Dead” is real. And what should be made of the young, non-revolutionary saying that fear of the future is “a hobby of the elderly who no longer have a future”? Is that a protective claim? Or maybe nobody asked real young people whether they were afraid of the future or not?
If “GRM Brainfuck” were the self-made staging of an upper-level theater group that, after reading Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” in the advanced English course, was encouraged to just think critically about digitization, populism, consumer totalitarianism and such: you would be somewhat impressed, especially with all the money that has been invested. As it is, the evening looks like a tabular overview of all Motzki topics of the recent past, described from an armchair criticism that seems about as contemporary as dabbing or the raft dance: just over and therefore particularly late.