The man who swung back and forth across the stage at the New House of the Berliner Ensemble in a cardigan look is sure: He hasn’t experienced anything greater than the birth of his daughter. Incredibly, this “Woouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuouuuuouuuuuuouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuouuuuuuouuuuuuः) he is excited at the ramp with flashing eyes.” Vuus “due to scientific progress. His wife went to get pregnant by artificial insemination.
A little later, the cardigan type is ready to jump over the open window of a hotel room on the 13th floor. And scientific progress is also responsible for this. His wife did not survive the birth. An additional measure in reproductive medicine that was not absolutely necessary, but was particularly promising and exclusive, had given rise to complications.
So it is a dialectic situation with which Dennis Kelly’s new piece “Der Weg Zuruk” – a commissioned work written specifically for the Berliner Ensemble and staged by David Bosch – begins. Unfortunately, the protagonist draws a completely monotheistic conclusion from this. After walking down the window again at the last minute because of his daughter, he becomes an outspoken enemy of science and founded a regression movement—one that was particularly damaging to audiences.
Because from now on this piece continues in the same one-dimensional form as the hero’s head. Kelly developed a striking dystopia from the complex initial situation, which over two hours and several generations later ended in regression levels exactly where one had suspected from the beginning: into dictatorially administered total stupidity.
Cranberries Instead of Chemotherapy
While the list of measures in the age group of the cardigan wearer was more or less at the level of alternative cancer therapy efforts (cranberry instead of chemo), daughter Dawn (Claude De Demo) and her boyfriend Jonathan (Dennis Svensson). is already setting research laboratories on fire and fueling universities.
Grandsons, a pair of twins whose male side (Jonathan Kempf) also suffer tearful, incestuous tendencies toward mother and twin sister (Phyllene Schmolzer), then finally appear as militant functionaries of a “National Regression Council” give, which is in service of an exhaustive refutation of the complexity of prescribed language rules: vocabulary can consist only of monosyllables.
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The fact that the evening seems fairly half-hearted is largely due to the fact that Kelly is more interested in deducing surface categories than actually delving into the underlying discourses. Basically, “The Way Back” works like a wild mix of slogans, using the current mass of discourse from all directions and mixing up what can be found there – “anti-science”. From “Eco-dictatorship” – in a maximally sad pulp, of which accordingly remains unclear who he actually addresses.
“Kill the scientists, not the animals”
Premiere director David Bosch is doing his best to mix at least a little of the visual variety into the integrated anthracite rather than light, which is really difficult to bring out in the dark here. There’s a lot going on on the stage, which Patrick Banwart has furnished with picturesque, rocky furniture and unusable electronic waste.
[Nächste Aufführungen am 4., 5., 9. und 10. DezemberNächste Aufführungen am 4., 5., 9. und 10. Dezember]
At first, Gerrit Jensen, with his sloppy appearance as a regression representative of the first generation, approaches the audience in a low-threshold, sympathetic way. With the object of his desire, his daughter makes a clever slap to initiate relationships, which is certainly in contrast to the degree of seriousness with which concrete plans to kill scientists are made at the same time. “Kill scientists, not animals” is written on the firewall.
Finally, Patrick Banwart and Falco Harold add an artfully apocalyptic video animation to the event with an aesthetically substantial archaic silhouette. And as Philyn Schmolzer’s great-granddaughter “Don, the Second”, with which the story ends, monologues with great enthusiasm for verbal awkwardness determined through a monosyllabic cascade at the end. Of course, only to refuse to snatch away every little theft of the Light of Knowledge in the all-pervading darkness. So that the story – then the message of the evening – begins again in prehistory.
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