Political Theater | Whoop, whoop

Tall house, high ladder, high tone: “please stop chewing!” Photo: Ballhaus Wedding/Dominik Maringer The bodyguards, or those who want to be one, guard the entrance. They are a bit young, but like the professionals in front of the Bundestag, they are busy peering over the heads of the people waiting in the courtyard of the Ballhaus Prinzenallee. Then we go in, through the back entrance, along the mirrors in front of which the make-up was just checked. This meta level is fitting, because tonight is about unmasking, taking a look behind the scenes. They call it “a documentary spectacle.” Is this just a clever idea from a small theater in Berlin-Wedding that wants to desecrate the power of the high house, a student theater idea?

The drone sounds inside drive away such thoughts. On a ladder-like platform, surrounded by mighty columns, the president of the house speaks: “Take a seat. “Please take off your hat and please stop chewing,” she says, reminding us in French, Turkish and all sorts of other languages ​​of the inviolable dignity of the house. She is a little high from the force of her own majesty and writhes lasciviously in her chair. Susana Abdul Majid plays the eroticism of the state authority magnificently, a choir accompanies the hammering, electrifying sounds that are recorded live.

We are “Inside Bundestag”, the first of six episodes until December with changing personnel is about the staging of the production, the ritualized spectacle of parliament, directed by Lukas David Schmidt.

At the end of the first week of meetings, not far from the government district, in the lively grandeur of multicultural Wedding, we will dissect what is happening in the plenary session of the parties elected by the people. It is a piecework work, because the politician's text was not yet written shortly before the premiere, it was itself in the making; director Schmidt composed it from the general debate in the Bundestag.

So we are close to the present, the current is still working. No wonder that it is a staged reading, a best-of of the speeches, but surprising how well the choir works. Because choral speaking is more complicated than you might think. The stakes have to be right, and on this evening they are right, thanks to the wonderful players Vidina Popov, Laura Laufenberg and Lisa Birke Balzer.

“Everything should be much more lively.” Is that the case when the populists rely so much on emotions?

Things get serious where they need to be serious. Lars Klingbeil's meaningful speech on new debt, for example, collapses miserably amid cries from the AfD. Perhaps you wouldn't have expected it from a theater that has a post-migrant orientation, but one-sided representation, or more precisely: an omission, for example, from the AfD, who are keen on remigration, cannot be observed. So it's not a theater for the initiated center-left, there is also laughter on behalf of the politically unpopular - no, it doesn't get any more unobjective than in the high house itself. Sometimes it's just a playful emphasis on what is already based in reality, like Friedrich Merz's flirtation with Bundestag President Julia Klöckner, who has to protect him from shouts.

At least things are businesslike until the last third begins. The plenum leaves the stage and things get flamboyant. A stripper dressed in provocative red does what cannot be missed on such a spectacular evening at the theater: an audience performance. It is still very vague to shout, to let out what makes you angry. Okay, funny, someone at the front is very committed, others join in, then it becomes a collective roar. But why all this?

“Everything should be much more lively,” the stripper says, “a little more eroticism, more feeling.” Is that the case, since the populists rely so much on emotions?

Such outrageous sentiment leaves analytical observation somewhat short-changed. But it's stimulating and nice to see that everyone watching at the end also moves their bodies, which were just attentively erect, shaking their bootys just as they were being shaken at the front. This is probably only possible in the theater, where the boundaries between others are erased, the different communities are celebrated in a quirky and heated manner, where elsewhere people are working to destroy them.

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