Start of the German Theater season: Space Earth Crap

2023-09-19 12:02:33

Opinion at the start of the German Theater season

Space Earth crap

As of: 12:02 p.m. | Reading time: 4 minutes

Anja Schneider in “Space Earth Man”

Source: Thomas Aurin

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The Deutsches Theater is the oldest and best-financed theater in Berlin. Art is to be produced here that will radiate far beyond the capital. However, the first production under the new artistic director Iris Laufenberg only rolls out the stale clichés of post-drama.

At the second performance of “Weltall Erde Mensch” the hall of the Deutsches Theater Berlin is only moderately full. And after the break, the distances to the next seat neighbor in the stalls would correspond to even the strictest epidemic regulations, that’s how big the gaps are. There is also said to have been a mass exodus during the break at the premiere the evening before. No wonder. “Space Earth Man” is an underground evening of theater: screwed up, not serious, complacent. An unbearable combination.

That would be unpleasant, but not a big deal, if it were just any premiere – and not the eagerly awaited start of Iris Laufenberg’s directorship after the recent dry Ulrich Khuon years, from which one can expect a programmatic setting. Also about this house: The Deutsches Theater is financially best equipped of the Berlin theaters to radiate beyond the city limits – and not sink into dull theater province.

“Space Earth Man” wants to tell a lot – “#Startup #Weightlessness #Science Fiction” – but can’t. Science fiction, socialism, battle of the sexes, a bit of Joanna Russ and Stanislaw Lem, but nothing comes together. With Dietmar Dath’s “Never Story” you can spend a better evening on these topics. The program list contains the usual phrase bingo: “pleasurable expedition into the unknown,” “associative collage,” “celebrating emancipatory and philosophical potential,” “beyond linear narratives,” and so on.

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What director Alexander Eisenach brings to the stage is a complete artistic failure, hardly any more exaggerated drama school theater. Everything here is a backdrop because it is not alive: the language, the game, the theme. Word has probably gotten around by now about how little “emancipatory” theater that is insulated from experience is. Like the discourses in the program, only things are on stage. So on the stage, where people once felt obliged to act as a form of resistance against reification.

Is this the new spirit of the house? Or rather a disaster? What focus do you want to set if you leave Eisenach the big stage at the start of the artistic directorship? Eisenach has worked at the Volksbühne and the Berliner Ensemble, where he recently worked unconvincingly with the unoriginal Bertolt Brecht title “The Maybe Sayer”, albeit on the side stage. Eisenach no longer needs to be asserted as an artist in Berlin, unlike Julien Gosselin at the Volksbühne, for example.

At the premiere of Gosselin’s monumental collage “Extinction” by Arthur Schnitzler and Thomas Bernhard, many spectators also left the hall. The French director’s style, freed from any irony, is too unusual. At Eisenach, on the other hand, there is nothing left but ironic nonsense. Aesthetically, it’s just epigonal, it casts and Hartmannizes to no end. All of this has already been implemented, just at a higher level. Do you want to suggest to the Berlin audience that they haven’t really seen and appreciated what Eisenach is doing for years? But then to provide counter-evidence?

Dildos and insects

By the time jammed dildo jokes, silly insect imitations and a pillow fight with colorful giant plush balls are on the program in the last part, you feel like you’re in a post-dramatic theater playgroup. The messages are shouted into the hall in stale seminar language – ChatGPT couldn’t have done a worse job – everyone talks about the hunters, but the collectors are really great too. Raise your bags! Great, the freshmen in cultural studies are happy about it.

Rarely has the old saying from the famous theater critic Alfred Kerr been as true as it was this evening: “When I looked at the clock at ten o’clock, it was only half past eight.” The program list announces three hours, but in the end it is almost four hours that feel even longer. That’s clearly too much for three half-thoughts – and countless bad jokes. And also for two dramaturges involved in the production. The director has to ask himself why this evening turns out this way.

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Castorfs „Boris Godunow“

While Karin Beier celebrated a lavish theater festival in Hamburg at the weekend with the first part of her antiquities marathon “Anthropolis” that makes you want to see the other parts, there is theater in Berlin to deter you – neither beautiful nor clever. Now one shouldn’t draw conclusions about the entire program from one production, but such an opening sheds light. At least there is already an opportunity to correct this first impression on Friday with a premiere by Rainald Goetz.