“Ride the subway again, do something nice for yourself!”
The Zoology of Social Being
Source: david baltzer / bildbuehne.de
How do you learn to love Berlin again after a long winter? By visiting Tim Egloff’s new production of “Line 1” – or boarding the subway directly. In the classic, the big city comes alive as a place of longing, dreamy and erotic.
Dhe yellow wagons trundling along the elevated railway are a must in any Berlin advertisement. Far more than just public transport, this is the smallest revue stage in the city, where, in the spirit of Erving Goffmann’s “We all play theatre”, one performance follows the other – from the night owls to the day labourers. The legendary musical “Line 1” is a homage to this place and to the old West Berlin between Wittenbergplatz and Schlesisches Tor. After more than 35 years it has now been restaged – and is even faster, funnier and more colourful.
Just four days after the reactor accident in Chernobyl, Ukraine, “Line 1” premiered at the Berlin Grips Theater. Volker Ludwig wrote the text and Birger Heymann composed the music. Director Tim Egloff has included the “BZ” front page with the “radiation catastrophe” in his new production – as well as many other things. Egloff has managed the feat of leaving “Line 1” untouched at its core, yet making everything look fresher with a lustrous ensemble. This is just as lucky for die-hard fans who can (and do) sing along to every line as it is for newcomers to “Line 1”.
Neon tubes radiate their dim, colorful light on the stage, which Marian Nketiah has cleared, in reduced space chic, the moving subway seats whirl skilfully over the parquet floor, a staircase for big performances leads to the band “No Ticket”, packed in glitter suits. A new coat of paint while retaining the substance, it’s the same with the music, which with synth sounds and saxophone now sounds even more like the 1980s – or how they’re returning today as retro fashion. It is estimated that half of the audience does not know the time from their own experience, but rather from the 80s parties in SO36.
The eye-catcher of the evening are the almost 200 costumes by Mascha Schubert, which should make even the last hipster from Hermannplatz green with envy. The 80s couldn’t have looked so colourful, so flashy, so casual, that’s more 80s than the 80s. A color correction of subsequent stylization, which doesn’t damage the staging, but rather strengthens it, because it’s about the myth of West Berlin in the 1980s. Exaggeration is in the nature of things here, making it an artistic means is only logical – and pretty to look at.
In the jungle
After almost 2000 performances and almost 37 years, “Line 1” is still inspiring. The story is as simple as “Ideal” inimitable sang it in 1980: “Bahnhof Zoo, my train is arriving / I’m getting off, it’s good to be back / down to the subway, past the alcohol / towards Kreuzberg, the journey is free!” A young woman from the province comes to the big city and meets different people – with a happy ending. Marie-Luise Scherer wrote the darker version in 1987 in one of her best texts, “The Uncanny Place Berlin”, where the protagonist ends up wrapped in plastic in a Kreuzberg attic.
Helena Charlotte Sigal as Natalie in “Line 1”
Source: david baltzer / bildbuehne.de
“Line 1” is not without its tragedy, but the eerie place becomes a big city experience for the heroine. Here she learns how to dream in anonymity. How political opposites collide. How erotic the fleetingness is – a sentimental education of late modernism. She gets her lesson in blaseness, as Georg Simmel called it in his famous essay on “The Big Cities and Intellectual Life”. For him, smugness was the hallmark of city dwellers, a “result of those rapidly changing nerve stimuli that were crowded together in their opposites.” Later one would call that coolness, always right in the middle with the appearance of the uninvolved. And the 80s were very cool, bordering on the cold.
The subway becomes the school of life in “Line 1”, here you meet conspiracy and normal crazy people, the unemployed and homeless, the lonely and the suicidal. Here a zoology of social being is created, as Honoré de Balzac had in mind, in the middle of the big city jungle (it is probably no coincidence that one of the most famous clubs in West Berlin bore this name). Bertolt Brecht had already discovered the railway compartment as a miniature society with the famous scene in “Kuhle Wampe” (1932), the birth of the public sphere from the spirit of shared means of transport, which is still relevant today.
“Line 1” is not only a panorama of this strange time, when you sang “See you recently!” and the sentence “I now have a cable connection!” proudly recited in your voice was still understood by people around you. It’s also a universal story about the challenges of living in a big city – and happiness. It is a celebration of the glamorous, of cultivated self-transgression and de-privatization against the philistine dystopia of small clans and tribal communities, whether over currywurst in Reinickendorf or oatmeal in Prenzlauer Berg. Riding the U1 into the night, you can still hear the line: “Take the subway again, do something nice for yourself!”
“Line 1” can be seen at the Grips Theater in Berlin until July 15.