2024-10-21 10:24:00
In “To Be or Not to Be” the disabled actors of the RambaZamba theater show how the tyrant director Peter Zadek staged “Hamlet”. The big highlight: Nele Winkler plays the role of her mother Angela, who played the hesitant title character at the time.
With the death of director Peter Zadek in 2009, the theater lost a great innovator and provocateur. Zadek wasn’t one of the quiet ones, he loved loud things. His career in the Federal Republic – his Jewish family fled with him to Britain, where he returned in the late 1950s – was accompanied by scandals. He was also one of the loudest during rehearsals and was considered a tyrant director due to his outbursts. At the RambaZamba theater in Berlin, disabled actors show with great pleasure how Zadek rehearses “Hamlet”.
The model comes from the writer and playwright Klaus Pohl, who adapted his novel “To be or not to be”, published in 2021, into a play and took over the direction himself. In 1999 Pohl was part of the legendary “Hamlet” troupe as Horatio; for “To Be or Not to Be” he captured the impressions of this excess of existential trials and condensed them with poetic finesse. This is how one of the funniest and most beautiful theatrical novels in recent history was born.
Peter Zadek’s greatest coup was casting Angela Winkler as Hamlet. Zadek felt it was essential that the headstrong actress show great resistance to the role of the hesitant Danish prince. According to Pohl, he is quoted as saying, “If you want to play Hamlet, you are wrongly cast.” Winkler didn’t want to and even ran away from rehearsals several times. Pohl’s biggest coup is that he cast his daughter Nele Winkler as the reluctant Angela Winkler.
Nele Winkler, born with Down syndrome, has been on the RambaZamba stage for over 25 years. Now he can boast a truly impressive filmography. Now she is sitting on the floor of the stage (with jet black walls, as the great director wanted), with the yellow Reclam textbook in front of her.
But the text doesn’t go as it wants – or vice versa – the flow of speech is interrupted and the words get confused. It’s a fight with the language that we know from the actors of RambaZamba and that viewers love because it has something truly unique. A game within a game on the bodies of the actors and the heads of the directors, which collide and yet come together.
The rehearsals themselves seem chaotic. Sebastian Urbanski as the solar-glassed Zadek performs finely orchestrated screaming concerts with his assistant, played by Eva Fuchs, while the actors stroke their egos in a circle. To scream. And there are tender moments too: when Jonas Sippel as Klaus Pohl – with his trademark hat and writer’s bag – ensnares the imitation of Hamlet with red roses and even a small red bicycle. Or Christian Behrend as Wildgruber speaking his last words against the backdrop of the sea (the non-swimmer drowned himself in the North Sea after “Hamlet”).
The large troupe RambaZamba brings the history of the theater to life: when the top ensemble of the time – including Ulrich Wildgruber, acclaimed in a Bochum Zadek production of “Hamlet” (under a folding aluminum ladder with a cardboard sign like Strasbourg Cathedral) – gets very drunk (“Better to be a drunkard known in the city than an anonymous alcoholic.”), then all the vanities and grudges end up on the long table. And in the end it happens anyway – or precisely because of this? – to the premiere! This is theater.
Theater about theater is often a lot of fun. See what happens before the premiere or behind the scenes: the real human dramas. Oliver Reese, the director of the Berliner Ensemble, just showed it at Schiffbauerdamm with the slapstick classic “The Naked Madness,” as a grotesquely over-the-top 1980s traveling troupe in a completely normal state of emergency. “To be or not to be” at the RambaZamba Theater, however, is more serious: it also shows the tragic in the comic.
“To Be or Not to Be” will be performed on 28, 29 and 30 November 2024, RambaZamba TheatreBerlin
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