“Hopefully we will never see that again,” Amarillis hugs into the camera of her computer. “Experience? I’m not experiencing anything here,” her mother Iris etches back. She is offended that the family doesn’t get together for Christmas, and will continue to do so for this entire virtual celebration. Somehow it could have been organized for the family to meet, despite the strict Corona rules, she nags all the time. And blames her daughter for the fact that five people are now sitting in front of computers in three different places: she and her partner Stefan, the single parent Amarillis and her son Arthur and his godfather Klaus.
The author and director Paul Plamper is in his radio play Silent Night II – Family Christmas in a video call Amazing success. He tells a story that one has long since grown tired of the subject in a way that is profitable and enjoyable to hear. Because he doesn’t dedicate himself to the superficial effects and also finds an elegant way to extend his comedy from the past of Christmas 2020 into the present and, in the last few minutes, even into the future.
Family Christmas is dominated by compulsive behavior
Plamper already did eight years ago Silent night (rest 3) staged, a hell of a trip through the Christmas festival of this quintet, which is now in Silent Night II comes together again, even if only virtually – incidentally also with the same ensemble of speakers: Margarita Broich, Schorsch Cameroon, Caroline Peters, Franz Broich-Wuttke and Thomas Blisniewski. At this family Christmas, an explosive mixture of rigid traditions and compulsive behavior is simmering. Everyone complains a lot and is quick to get grumpy. The gifts determine the evening because they all have a subtext – or one is assigned to them – that lets the emotions rise up within this pentagon: The feelings for one another are expressed in these goods and their (useful) value.
In the sequel, Plamper turns this fatal web even further, and also Silent Night II is again a lot more comedy than tragedy. Plamper does not rest on “you have to turn the sound on” jokes, but observes very closely how a conversation shifts when five people talk to each other on computers. In repetitive loops, he shows how rituals constrict a group, but also stabilize it at the same time. Christmas is celebrated three times in his radio play: 2020, 2021 and 2022. And one suspects: Much of it can be relentlessly derived from one’s own perspective.
Silent Night II – Family Christmas in a video call, WDR 3, December 19, 7:04 p.m.
Silent Night (rest 3) – Christmas is being unpacked, WDR 3, December 18, 7:04 p.m.; Bavaria 2, December 19, 3:05 p.m.; DLF Kultur, December 23, 10:03 p.m.