In the decade in which Bonn Park was a child, the German-speaking theater was concerned with getting the canon of classics off the pedestal with as much irony as possible. The so-called pop theater of the nineties took lightly everything that seemed inaccessible in the dramas, dressed Shakespeare, Chekhov and Schiller in show costumes in front of video collages or smashed a bust of Goethe with a sledgehammer. Behind this was a portion of rebellion against the directing fathers of that era and their pathos, a socialization through pop-punk, funk and scruffy folk, as well as the urgent desire to talk about yourself. Even if there was often not so much drama and experience besides nightly euphoria, media consumption and first love pains, which made it worth telling others about.
With this supposed carelessness, thirty years later the Berlin author Bonn Park worked on the noble subjects of the schedule constraints, and won several industry prizes with it before the lockdowns. The latest trick: a piece for the Deutsche Schauspielhaus in Hamburg, which officially adapts Schiller’s “Räuber”, but is actually a child comfort musical for adults with the phrase “Everything will be fine”. Park, who himself staged his piece “Die Räuber der Herzen” (The Robbers of Hearts), which he developed during rehearsals, in the Malersaal, crosses Schiller’s first drama with the film “Ocean’s Eleven”, lets all adults and children speak, and has hired the magician Jan Logemann, who can let a beach trickle out of your fist.
The state actors preschool class then experienced the bangle-blower adventure in Las Vegas with a mixture of amazement, defiance and exercises in Helge Schneider’s humor. Between dainty neon palm trees, huge one-armed bandits and an orange-red show staircase that leads to a safe-elysium in the background, dressed in a western wardrobe with flame decorations and cowboy boots (stage and costumes: Laura Kirst), the excitement and melancholy of a children’s day are recreated. The Spiegelberg brothers Fisto and Fausty (Jonas Hien and Matti Krause) argue who can be the leader of the gang. Shorty (Eva Bühnen) makes herself important by whispering. And Karl Ozean (Angelika Richter) lets her friends chase away the sadness that arises with a bubble bath, Obama speech, fricassee and the lullaby from 2012.
Central message: “Because everything, everything will be fine. And nothing, nothing at all is bad.”
One line is about climate change, world war and pandemic, the next about German R’n’B, a vegan cook and bad billionaires. Central message: “Because everything, everything will be fine. And nothing, nothing at all is bad.” In this childlike tenor, the piece ripples nicely. Sachiko Hara and Sasha Rau jointly perform the three roles of the Moor family who stayed at home with Schiller, here: Amalia, Franz and his father, Ozean. Sometimes stubborn, sometimes just naive, they trim the scheming conflicts that the most famous offender of Sturm und Drang, Franz Moor, provokes in Schiller, down to the lowest level of banality.
And in this context the Dadaist central gospel of this irony musical resounds in the Las Malersaal: “The song of impressive sentences and vocabulary from” The Robbers “by Friedrich Schiller”. An absurd reading of quotations from intentionally suppressed contexts brings lines of text together as randomly as if poetry were roulette. The “spleen-addicted Podagrian moralist”, the “proud whirlpool” or “Amalia colon” are sung about here alongside famous quotes such as: “The law has spoiled what would have been eagle’s flight into a snail’s walk.” And they all sing: “Hotto!”
This half-comical bloodletting of seriousness and meaning, which Bonn Park with its “Robbers of Hearts” does to Schiller, but also to Ocean’s Eleven, leaves only an ambivalent impression. It’s all not bad, but is it also good?