On the steps in front of the entrance, in the foyer and in the hall, it looked as if the theater could finally be more exciting than football for an evening. Desperate people begged for leftover tickets with cardboard signs, photographers snapped at Katja Riemann and other important guests, sparkling wine at the expense of the house and agreeing to participate in a historic moment of culture. Perhaps there has not been such a humming and enthusiastically celebrated theatrical premiere on 31 August 1928 since the premiere of the "Threepenny Opera" by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht in Berlin. On Wednesday evening 2000 spectators applauded the premiere of René Pollesch's "Faith in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world" in the Friedrichstadt-Palast.
It's a production that dances, plays great music and speaks of the badness of the world. And in the end, what the writer Elias Canetti wrote about the audience of the "Threepenny Opera" premiere nine decades ago: "The people cheered themselves, they were themselves, and they liked each other."
Mix of time-critical talk theater and revue work
Completely in the manner in which Brecht and Weill once combined socially critical spoken theater and opera into a grandiose new form of bastard art, director Pollesch, actor Fabian Hinrichs and 27 dancers from the Friedrichstadt-Palast ensemble now have a mix of time-critical spoken theater and Revue handicraft produced. You can see yellow, blue and red laser beam sculptures and carefully choreographed ballet magic on stage.
You see a golden gleaming hero like an astronaut floating in the starry night sky. And you hear sentences about the misery of mass people trapped in capitalism. There is talk of the adolescents who hang around Alexanderplatz "with their minimum standards of participation" and "without utilization logic". From the "loneliness in the net Supermarket" and the demise of the GDR. Helmut Kohl simply sat down on Erich Honecker and flattened him physically, it is said once. "What was that socialist situation?"
For almost two decades, the director Pollesch was the outstanding theater maker of the Berliner Volksbühne alongside Frank Castorf. She once put the word "east" on the roof. Now Pollesch, grown up and educated in Hesse, is allowed to compete in the Friedrichstadt-Palast, which was the showhouse of the Honecker state in socialist times - and in the decades since the fall of the Wall has remained more east than the Volksbühne ever was. A great but also risky constellation. Two usually ignoring theatrical worlds are shorted.
Wit, glittering splendor and choreographic precision
For a few months it has been known that in autumn 2021 Pollesch will become the new director of the Volksbühne, where, after Castorf's forced departure, his Belgian successor, Chris Dercon, crashed. Pollesch is famous for a theater in which the actors cheerfully improvise to complex, sophisticated, Pollesch self-written texts. The Revuegenre cultivated in the Friedrichstadt-Palast demands shameless wit, glittering splendor and choreographic precision.
With a colorful plume on his skull, in a plush shirt and harem pants, the actor Hinrichs stalks the limelight from the backdrop dark at the beginning. Soon he will only have a full body gold dress on. After half an hour, he sighs in a quiet moment, "Why am I standing here, I have my legs, I can not dance." Sheer coquetry. Because as he says that, the dance amateur Hinrichs has almost perfectly flung his legs to heaven in a chorusline parade with the Friedrichstadt-Palast dancers and fitted very funny in choreographies that show hammering factory workers or homeless people shivering with cold.
William Minke
Fabian Hinrichs is dancing in the glittering fiddle
The piece text of "Belief in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world" has, as Pollesch often, hardly to do with the title and reports surprisingly straightforward of sheer loneliness experiences. For example, the suicide attempt of a six-year-old boy. From the sad beauty of shoppers at the supermarket checkout. And the fate of the entertainer Daniel Küblböck.
The music is made up of streetchildren, sometimes by Pink Floyd and sometimes by Maurice Ravel. During the seemingly radiant show performances of the dancers, however, there are always irritating pictures. In the stage play of the current stage show "Vivid", which is dominated by cardboard robes, individuals emerge from the group, crouch under a neon-illuminated bridge or storm wildly into the audience. Here is the mica of the crowd, there the rebellion of the individual - once summarizes the leading actor Hinrichs the paradox of the evening in an old cabaret joke: "Only prison guards have something against escapism."
No mere updating of the successful model
In fact, the only 70 minutes long staging offers ravishing and not particularly disturbing entertainment. Maybe some of the brokers will say it's an easy victory Pollesch and Hinrichs win here. "Kill Your Darlings!" was the Pollesch-staged Volksbühne evening, in which Hinrichs performed a similarly merry combination of artistry and political discourse in 2012 with leisure-time gymnasts. Anyone who wants can understand "faith in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world" as a continuation of this model of success.
And yet, the performance is not just about admirable chutzpah, historical awareness and cleverness, but also about a phenomenal enthusiasm for art. "You walk through the city and think: Only the buildings want to have our love," calls Hinrichs once in the hall. In the end, when 2,000 people celebrate the stage heroes hooting, clapping and trampling, one can say: the Friedrichstadt-Palast loves back this evening.
"Belief in the possibility of the complete renewal of the world" : Friedrichstadt-Palast Berlin, next performances on 23.10. (sold out), 6.11. and 11.12. www.palast.berlin