Theater for everyone: Theater 89: “Come Karliniken, come…”

Once, in 1982, I, tall, with glasses, dark curls, over 40, a teacher in Berlin, stood next to a high school graduate from my own 12th grade: Simone Frost, short, dark blonde, a fine face and knowing dark brown eyes, met by chance the intersection of Friedrichstrasse and Chausseestrasse. She was crocheting a large cloth. “For my mom,” she said.

We stood for a long time while the traffic light colors changed several times. She was taking advantage of the waiting time, she said with a mischievous smile, because it was a slow intersection and we were engrossed in conversation, we had established a mutual trust and ignored the surroundings. At that moment, not a word was said about the metal guardhouse opposite the Permanent Representation of the Federal Republic of Germany or about the bright red tulip bed in the vacant lot, and we didn’t even talk about Biermann, who had already been there for a long time. We only thought of his song: “The children play so loudly and beautifully, the courtyard becomes a whole theater. The fat women look out the window and wait for their father.” Simone was one of these sung children when, soon after, at the age of nine, she played little “Saint Johanna” in a film based on Brecht’s “The Visions of Simone Machard” during the Second World War played.

Helene Weigel had told the mature and talented actress Simone Frost: “You’ll come to the theater straight away.” So she worked intensively at the BE and the Volksbühne as a child and as a student, and she continued to go when she could. to drama school, learn something new. “But I wanted a high school diploma, I’m good at math, and I’m also interested in physics. It’s better if you can do that too, right?” – “Yes,” I said, “that’s good.” She was asked a question and successful actress and subsequently represented the East German Berliner Ensemble on many stages in Europe.

But when the door to the world opened in 1989 to compete anew with the other side, what she could no longer counted for, “it” had been taken away from her, just as what they could had been taken away from many, many. Simone fought like a lioness for her place at the BE and for her only child, who needed stem cells to fight cancer. She fought for a long time, acted, trained and trimmed, looked after the child who came back to life and worked hard.

But then she lost her job at the BE, for which she had been celebrated in Paris when she was once “allowed to travel”. At that time she played Antoine Saint-Exupéry’s Little Prince. And Hans-Joachim Frank played the fox. With enormous energy, he was a docile student of the Brecht traditions and became Simone’s “companion.” It was Simone who gave his new little theater the name, even before the Berlin Wall came down: Theater 89.

When the founder of the first independent theater in East Berlin converted a break room in the building of a polytechnic high school on Wilhelm-Pieck-Strasse (today Torstrasse) into a theater with his own hands and helpers at the beginning of 1989, he fell off the ladder. For many weeks he had to continue to advance his most endangered project, walking on two crutches, which he did tirelessly and determinedly.

What did they want? They didn’t want a theater that was too expensive, attended only by educated people, who, after the performance, were preoccupied with who and where they were going to eat with, and with the question of whether their cautious assessment of the evening was correct .

Of course it was good that the restrictive DDR fear that inhibited the ideas and skills of artists ended, and that a good move stirred up what had not been seen and heard. But Hans-Joachim Frank and his people did not allow themselves to be seduced. In any case, they remained brave. “It”, the miracle of a still resistant and critical theater 89, finally performed the minutes of the last meetings of the SED Politburo in Berlin, which was very impressive.

A grant from the city of Berlin was then lost, but they didn’t stop. Their foundations on Torstrasse and near Jüterbog, in the old officers’ mess, were wrested out of their hands again. Simone died. Fellow players were lost, but Hans-Joachim Frank carried on, founded a traveling stage, kept the name, found new colleagues and also received funding from the state of Brandenburg.

One thing that director Hans-Joachim Frank always achieves when he chooses pieces is that his players are likeable; Whatever their character, they are convincing individually and as a group. All the characters in “Beaver Pelt” differ so clearly from each other that one takes pleasure in the naturalism – and in the Berlinness that Hauptmann was able to observe in his fellow citizens in Erkner in 1890.

The washerwoman Wolff wants to improve her family’s life. She is portrayed by Kristin Schulze with a wonderful singing voice. The author bases his siding with them against the property owners and the Prussian officials in their more fixed thinking. Singing together means being a unit, so a socially critical comedy turns into a defiantly happy Singspiel with old, resistant material: “Max, you’ve got the shoving down…” Or: “Come on Karliniken, come on, we want to go to Rixdorf.” …” And: “There’s a wood auction in Grunewald, in Grunewald …” The audience sings along, they remember their grandparents and a wonderful childhood.

A song like this has an empowering self-irony. “My mother always spreads the butter along the wall…” A tradition is carried on, a survival strategy of the disadvantaged is celebrated.

Last ideas from »Biberpelz«: Treuenbrietzen, August 24th, 7:30 p.m., Ratshof am Wasserturm; Herzberg (Elster), August 31st, 6.30 p.m., Botanical Garden; Mühlberg/Elbe, September 8th, 4 p.m., Marienstern Monastery.

They wanted a theater that was for everyone.

–

Subscribe to the “nd”

Being left is complicated.
We keep track!

With our digital promotional subscription you can read all issues of »nd« digitally (nd.App or nd.Epaper) for little money at home or on the go.
Subscribe now!