Volksbühne at Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz | Yesterday's avant-garde

At least well-intentioned: “House of Hopes” by Rimini Protocol Photo: Bahar Kaygusuz At least he made one thing clear: under him, no one should expect mere cultivation of classics. And Matthias Lilienthal, the newly appointed director of the Berliner Volksbühne, was actually not prepared for this. Proscenium stage, drama canon, professional actors who are guided by professional directors and speak literary texts - that's not his thing.

After seven weeks of splashing fun at Luxemburg-Platz, the instant “Volksbad” whose biggest fan was the director himself, the theater art was finally about to begin. Berlin's former culture senator Joe Chialo (CDU) had promised a new departure for the Volksbühne with the appointment of the new artistic director. What can you say? It now looks a little as if the cultivation of classics has triumphed over the avant-garde. These are the long-established classics of the 21st century that are taking place again here.

During a long first premiere weekend, three productions were presented to the curious Berlin audience. The theater collective Rimini Protocol, known for its interactive and documentary spectacles and the hot shit in the theater of the 2000s, made the strange start with “House of Hopes”.

Divided into different groups, the audience is led through the entire theater building - from the Green to the Red Salon, from the star foyer via the tier directly to the revolving stage - and is informed about the state of the world in several stages between participatory theater and short lecture, starting from 1989.

So you mentally travel around the globe and learn about the hope for a unification of the two Korean states, hear about the fight against apartheid and for democracy in Namibia, and go to the round table in Warsaw as a representative of Solidarity. Everything is perfectly timed and fits together in an exemplary compositional manner. But above all, the whole undertaking is terribly well-intentioned and therefore beyond any doubt.

Even the dramaturgical trick of making 1989 the starting point seems heavily constructed in most of the scenes, which are not performed by actors but by so-called "everyday experts", i.e. informed laypeople. You quickly understand whether Romania or Hungary, misery - like the hope in the title - exists everywhere. But isn't that a rush? You soon feel more like you are in a compulsory educational program than a theater. After a good two hours you can pat yourself on the back for your own spirit of resistance.

Attention, concept! Anta Recke's production "Perfection" has successfully buried its literary original. Photo: Lee Everett Thieler The Prater, the smaller venue of the Volksbühne in Prenzlauer Berg, has also resumed operations after several years. Vincenzo Latronico's astonishingly clever Berlin novel "The Perfections" was brought to the stage (under the title "Perfection"). It is the story of Anna and Tom, two “expats” who come to wild and cheap Berlin in the early 2000s. They both work in the creative industry, meet their short-term friends who have also arrived and witness the development that they themselves have forced, which is called gentrification. Latronico only needs a few impressive descriptions, hardly any action, no dialogue to create a precise portrait of a generation.

And in the Prater? There is virtually nothing left of the novel. You're always a long way from hitting the right note. In the end, nobody really knows what should be told. The milieu so vividly depicted in the novel remains invisible. The bitter criticism of people whose lifestyle includes going to a vernissage or the newly popular club as well as short-term help for refugees and who can take photos of all this in an Instagrammable way because it wouldn't have happened otherwise does not occur.

The director Anta Recke, who is said to have a particularly conceptual approach to her work, is also listed on the cast list under the keyword “T-shirt concept”. That evening, the players wear shirts with varying inscriptions: “international nobody”, “national nobody”, “no” and “body”. The shirts are happily changed. Rarely was an idea so far removed from an idea.

The last of the three premiere evenings with the illustrious name “Mononoke” seems to be the most aesthetically challenging. Japanese director Satoko Ichihara invited South Korean visual artist Mire Lee to create the stage for her. She put a Japanese café on the front stage. But behind the iron curtain are oversized metal sculptures. In “Mononoke” you can finally see parts of the new Volksbühne ensemble playing. Various dolls also characterize the scene: a classic Japanese Bunraku doll, led by three black-clad players, as well as a sex doll.

Hello, beloved Japanese cliché! »Mononoke« by Sachiko Ichihara Photo: Diana Pfammatter But the plot in this somewhat pseudo-provocative spectacle leaves you at a loss: Takako turns to the fortune teller Princess Monoprix because an iron egg no longer wants to leave her body after a successful masturbation attempt. The princess is certain: it is an iron egg and the reason for her discomfort is a curse from her father, who abandoned her. A doctor who was once a steelworker and soon turns out to be an artist, she meets her father, who lives with a sex doll who is supposed to pass as a Japanese goddess.

In order to cure Takako, she should donate her iron egg. She will then be given her father's sperm in an artificial womb. But her father – who would have thought? – is not her father at all and is also sterile. The scenic event is garnished by Takako's dialogue with a lactic acid bacterium in her vagina. That quickly sounds like an infotainment offer on the topic of sex education.

With an ironic constant wink, the audience is made to believe that the shallow events are of course just a parodic pointer to no less superficial models. This is rough cutlery that is used for operations at the Volksbühne. This theater has proven often enough that it can shift the audience's horizon of expectations in a different and more effective way. If Matthias Lilienthal wants to build on this, he will have a difficult time if he relies on artistic strategies that are already past phenomena in theater history.

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