2023-09-19 17:47:36
Life punishes anyone who comes late. A couple hurries down the front row and now has to take the last remaining seats – and they are on the stage. They pull themselves together, grumble about having to find a parking space and push the program booklet back and forth with a few snarky comments. Somehow the two of them are hoping for a bit of a cheerful distraction, they could have done something differently – but what actually? Maybe have sex again? Unlikely. So to the theater. In short: Here he, the average viewer, sits in his elementary form, as a couple.
The spectators who have taken their seats on the stage of the Hamburger Kammerspiele are actors. The audience in the room immediately understands this. Stephan Benson and Nina Kronjäger play a middle-aged, middle-class couple with a middle-class car, somewhere between medium-funny and medium-exhausting. Everything is so mediocre, but is that a problem? The audience recognizes the similarity to themselves in the exaggeration, which is greeted with friendly sighs, understanding pats between partners and lots of laughter.
Although theaters today are competing for the most exciting audience – as young, diverse and gender fluid as possible – the reality in many halls looks like it did at the premiere of “What Was and What Will Be”, the new play by the theater that is considered successful and meaningful Boulevard-famous author duo Lutz Hübner and Sarah Nemitz (“Mrs. Müller has to go”): couple next to couple. Bertolt Brecht is said to have once said at the entrance to the Berliner Ensemble: “Penis and vagina, penis and vagina, always next to each other!” Despite all the “gender trouble”, not much has changed.
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Playwright Oliver Bukowski
White, West German, wealthy and heterosexual, is evil on stage here: the heteronormative and imperial way of life? Or the good: Germany, but normal? “We’re not bourgeois, we’re normal!” Theo exclaims when he feels like he has to defend himself in front of his wife’s cosmopolitan, successful friend, which he later regrets. “What was and what will be” is ostensibly not interested in the highly political debates about the concept of normality. It is not a judgmental look that is cast on the lives of the two protagonists, but an interested look.
What is shown is what is normal: a more or less satisfactory compromise solution with reality. Not the only possible miscarriage of life – although, unfortunately, that is often how it is understood and propagated – but a widespread one. She was once the glam girl at the disco and he was an uptight hippie. As students they touched each other by chance and couldn’t let go, career and children followed, later cancer and dementia. The feelings are mediocre, but you are also only moderately ambitious. In sport one would speak of a performance-related result.
Not even a counterproposal
Director Sewan Latchinian lets Kronjäger and Benson rummage through old slides and play the hits of their lives, supported by Alexa Harms in changing roles. The two of them’s memory work and reflections are permeated by a bit of nostalgia and the feeling that things could possibly have turned out differently. But how? There is a lack of imagination. “I don’t even have a counter-proposal to mourn after,” says Anke as she lounges bored in the lounger on her all-inclusive vacation. In any case, brutal political claims to validity cannot be formulated in this way.
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Over the course of two and a half hours, the evening gives away the benevolent approval of the audience that it had already acquired in the first few minutes. If you let the mirror be held in front of you, then the look in it can be more daring. The two are spared major conflicts, although it is implied that their children and grandchildren live in different times. It is not just the portrait of a couple, but also the portrait of a generation in the Federal Republic that grew up and grew up under transitory conditions that no longer exist or are disappearing today.
Each generation lives within its own possibilities and limitations, with social differences in what is possible and what is limited. By taking the couple’s inside perspective, the piece primarily goes against the popular but uninformative narrative of politics as the battle of the generations – Boomers against Millennials and Generation Z – as if things are different among the young than among the older ones There are also heirs to millions and unemployed people. Or the search for a little happiness in an adverse world.
So the evening purrs away like the photos in the slide show of memories, too smooth and too free of contradictions. And this despite the promising approach of not prematurely demonizing or confirming the audience, but rather putting them on stage as they are and playfully visualizing their experiences – from “wild youth” to aging. Farewell to templates such as generational hatred and contempt for normality? The plea for leniency that “What Was and What Will Be” attempts is ultimately too mild.
„What was and what will be“ at the Hamburger Kammerspiele, next performances on September 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 24th, 28th, 29th and 30th.
#Disco #dementia #life #slides