The man who slouches back and forth on stage at the New House of the Berliner Ensemble in an emphatic cardigan look: he’s never experienced anything greater than the birth of his daughter. Unbelievable, that “Woooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo girl” guy is excited up the slope with a shining eye. “Wuuusch” is due to scientific progress. His wife got pregnant through IVF.
A little later, this kind of sweater was ready to jump at the open window of a hotel room on the thirteenth floor. And scientific progress is to blame, too. His wife did not survive childbirth. An additional procedure in reproductive medicine that was not entirely necessary, but especially promising and exclusive, has resulted in complications.
So the dialectical situation begins with Dennis Kelly’s new piece “Der Weg zurück” – a commissioned work written specifically for the Berliner band and executed by David Bosch. Unfortunately, the protagonist draws completely non-dialectical conclusions from this. Having fallen off a window sill again at the last minute because of his daughter, he became a categorical enemy of science and founded a retreat movement – which was particularly harmful to the public.
Because from now on the piece continues in one dimension as in the head of the protagonist. Kelly developed an astonishing dystopia from the complex initial situation, which ended after two hours and several generations as well as regression levels exactly where one suspected it from the start: in complete, dictatorially administered idiocy.
Cranberry instead of chemotherapy
Während sich der Maßnahmenkatalog in der Alterskohorte des Strickjackenträgers noch mehr oder weniger auf dem Niveau alternativer Krebstherapieversuche (Cranberrys statt Chemo) eingependelt hatte, setzt Tochter Dawn (Clamit labude Sprehnä Devens) Brandsun air.
The grandchildren, a pair of twins, whose male part (Jonathan Kempf) also suffers from tearful incest tendencies towards the mother and twin sister (Phelen Schulzer), then finally emerge as military personnel of the National Regression Council, which is in the service of a blanket denial of complexity. Prescribed language regulations: Vocabulary may consist only of monosyllable syllables.
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The fact that the evening looks largely half-baked is due mainly to the fact that Kelly is more interested in skimming surface categories than getting into basic speeches. Essentially, Way Back functions as an unbridled mixture of slogans, which uses the current mass of rhetoric from all directions and blends everything that can be found there – from “anti-science” to “environmental dictatorship” – into a very bleak core, and thus remains vague as to who it is addressing. actually.
“Kill scientists, not animals”
The director of the premiere, David Bosch, does his best to mix visual diversity at least into uniform anthracite rather than light, which is really hard to bring into the dark here. There’s so much going on onstage that Patrick Panwart has furnished it with gorgeous rocking furniture and abandoned e-waste.
[Nächste Aufführungen am 4., 5., 9. und 10. DezemberNächste Aufführungen am 4., 5., 9. und 10. Dezember]
Firstly, Gerrit Jansen, as a decline actor of the first generation with his scruffy appearance, approaches the audience in a low-threshold and sympathetic manner. Aiming at her desire, his daughter then puts on clever clowning to start relationships, which is of course in extreme contrast to how dangerously concrete plans to kill scientists are falsified at the same time. The phrase “Kill scientists, not animals” was written on the firewall.
Finally, Patrick Bannwart and Falko Herold added a brilliantly playful animated video with an aesthetically appropriate retro silhouette to the event. And Willen Schmolzer as the great-granddaughter of “Second Dawn”, with whom the story ends, finally soliloquently with great enthusiasm for the verbal embarrassment described through a one-syllable series. Of course, just in order to forbid kidnapping for every little theft of light of knowledge in the omnipresent darkness. So the story – thus the evening’s message – begins again in prehistoric times.
“Alcohol buff. Troublemaker. Introvert. Student. Social media lover. Web ninja. Bacon fan. Reader.”
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