Kevin comes from Wedding and has a very small penis. He wanted to sleep with a woman for the first and last time 15 years ago. It was very romantic at first, but then she laughed at him because of his tiny genitals. Since then, Kevin (Lukas Turtur) has not been doing so well.
Marie (Jenny König) thinks the moaning in porn is violent. She is a teacher and has dedicated views and simple explanations on everything, especially for her own frivolity: “I’m just a little slower in my emotional reactions.” Bernd (Robert Beyer) takes care of his sick mother and has not had time for sex for a long time. The tough man with leather pants and a hipster beard thinks that if you have sex, it is better with trust. Pascal (Konrad Singer) is gay and Catholic and therefore did not want to have sex with his boyfriend before gay marriage. It was better that way, because the first sex after the wedding was terrible – no comparison to the chaste cuddling before it.
Britta (Genija Rykova) was deflowered by a Hans-Joachim in her late twenties, but he was a blood fetishist and only wanted to sleep with her when she had her period. And Fedora (Carolin Haupt) is convinced that sex is an important thing: “It’s like playing sports. Sometimes you have to force yourself to do it, but afterwards you’re happy about it.”
Aren’t we all a little “oversexed and underfucked”?
At the Berlin Schaubühne, you learn from people you would rather not get to know better, lots of intimacies that actually do not concern the rest of the world. You have to chat about something on long evenings at the theater to pass the time. The author Maja Zade is to blame for the sex talk, who with her new piece expects the audience to do exactly what the title of the evening promises: “Talking about sex”. Whether she wants to demonstrate Foucault’s thesis that the more people talk about sex, the less it is practiced, or just want to make an entire play out of the joke that we are all “oversexed and underfucked”, remains her secret.
The setting in Marius von Mayenburg’s world premiere is extremely simple. Six average contemporaries meet regularly to talk about their sex life on their yoga mats: Six people are looking for an orgasm. In between, the director treats them to some pretty vocal interludes to relax, including a skilfully groaned version of the shredded classic “Relax” by Frankie Goes to Hollywood.
Perhaps the performance serves as a substitute satisfaction in pandemic times
Since Maja Zade, a highly valued dramaturge at the Schaubühne, began to think of herself as an author two years ago, she has been writing one play after the other. After two clever guy comedies at the height of the zeitgeist (“Status Quo”, “Abyss”) and a completely confused “Oedipus” update, “Talking About Sex” is its fourth premiere at the house within two years. With her staff, who are so enthusiastic about information about the abdomen, at least she succeeds in a new, unfortunately completely superfluous genre: the punch-less tabloid piece.
Zade sends her made-up figures to the dash. Each and every one of these speech bubble suppliers is moderately inspired by the low and high points of instinctual life, without really knowing where this urge to confess comes from and where it is going: It’s nice that we talked about it. Are the intimate confessions supposed to provide therapeutic clarification for the dreary souls? Or is it just about the somewhat tired vanity demonstrations of the sex life owners, who are heavily fascinated by their wetlands and erect theses? Perhaps the performance simply serves as a substitute for satisfaction: If you hardly have a social life anymore due to the pandemic, you can at least watch a few contemporaries in the theater as they sniff each other. Anyone who thought before visiting the Schaubühne that sex is actually a very pleasant thing has been thoroughly taught a bit more boring.