The good news first. The end of the world is not happening. At least not tonight. “No end of the world” is on the program of the Berlin Schaubühne, the world premiere of the new play by the young British author Chris Bush, staged by Katie Mitchell. But the optimistic first word in the title has been crossed out. Obviously, everything goes well after all is just one of many possibilities. With the consistency of a Brecht didactic play, Bush and Mitchell play through what sociologists call contingency: Each decision could have turned out differently, otherwise it would not be a decision, but a necessity, fate or a law of nature. And of course, each of these contingent decisions has consequences and thus forces a large number of follow-up decisions.
Chris Bush declines this with many small shifts and variations on a simple everyday situation. We see moments of an interview with the young scientist Dr. Anna Vogel (Alina Vimbai Strähler), with the climate researcher Professor Uta Oberdorf (Jule Böwe), who is famous in specialist circles. Sometimes she comes too late, sometimes too early, sometimes by taxi, sometimes by bike. Like the famous butterfly wings in chaos theory, every minimal deviation in this experimental set-up could have far-reaching consequences. Perhaps the climate professor does not like employees who come to work in a taxi – so no employment contract, no decisive contribution to climate research, no Nobel Prize, no saving the world climate, bad luck for humanity. The fact that the dramaturgical sleight of hand of quickly interlaced variations of the same situation is fun while watching is mainly due to how stoically Alina Vimbai Strähler, as a postdoc applicant, endures the humiliation ritual and drips off, and with what terribly bad mood and endless Fatigue Jule Böwe equips her science expert. Sure, climate change is terrible – but climatologists on stage can still be weird characters. A third, somewhat puzzling figure, Lena (Veronika Bachfischer), the daughter of a dead person, causes a crime story with her interjections: Apparently one of the two scientists died on an expedition.
The theater, too, is part of the decadent overconsumption society in its waste of time
Because the theater is always about everything, the production docks with the research area of the two scientists. The game with many possible decisions and their known and unknown consequences is radicalized. It is no longer just about a small job advertisement, but about the big questions of humanity, in this case about the climatic consequences of our way of life today, including the decision to defend hyperconsumption against all common sense. Here the staging gains urgency and thanks to the increasingly absurd scenarios that the scientists develop, it still does not slip into the school radio. As impossible as it is to portray climate change in the theater, Bush manages to at least involve the audience in ever more perplexed reflection on it.
Katie Mitchell, otherwise a virtuoso high-tech director of perfectly staged video and theater images, draws conclusions from the subject of the play with a performance that is as resource-efficient as possible. Two brave cyclists at the edge of the stage provide the electricity. Costumes and stage design (essentially three doors, from which the three players repeatedly step in and out) come from the fund. Instead of commuting between London and Berlin again and again, Mitchell has directed largely from London via video control. The result is a theater that is poor on the sensual surface, enormously rich in content, and which trusts the actresses and cleverly negotiated topics. That won’t save the world and, like everything in theater, is above all an aesthetic attraction. But it is at least honest and indirectly indicates that the wonderful luxury of the theater, the most beautiful mind-altering luxury item in the world, is part of the decadent overconsumption society in its waste. In the final applause, Jule Böwe makes an oppressive message: The director cannot bow, she is sick with Corona.