“Love Me Tender” on the Volksbühne – Peep!

No family, no love, no money: in “Love Me Tender” a woman wrestles for social autonomy, but the world clings to her. Less shine and glamor would have been good for the staging. Constance Debré, the author of the autobiographical narrative of the same name, rebelled against a standard of how to live as a woman. That alone would be as a topic of old -fashioned – Judith Butler’s “Gender Trouble” was published 35 years ago – but the discomfort that triggers this rebellion makes it remarkable.

The narrator doesn’t want much. After the separation from her husband, she is looking for social independence and an excessive love life with women-the Metro calls her her “Tussen line plan”-because she sworn off the men. Everything is subordinate to your letter. The work canceled, sometimes a separate room, plus an ascetic lifestyle: swimming in the morning, otherwise writing. Always write.

Zino Weys (director and space) solo evening, which is based on large trains on Debré’s novel, takes place on a kind of catwalk in the red salon of the Berlin Volksbühne, the audience is no more on the left and right. Spherical music accompanies the careful movements of Marie Rosa Tietjen, who embodies the role of the narrator. Sometimes she stretches out her butt or does gymnastic exercises, otherwise the staging looks more like a scenic reading. The leaves, from which Tietjen reads, gradually fall on the floor, are distributed in the room like the narrator’s bonds left behind, who leaves everything behind.

It is still very fun at the beginning, almost erotic, as Tietjen takes her lascivious looks into the audience, with the audiencewithin flirt. Somewhat ashamed, almost caught you feel like the fifth bike on the car of an intimate encounter. Like in a peepshow.

That is nice. We take part in the sex life with the partners, who only devours it, but gradually drops. “Why shouldn’t we be able to stop love to love each other?” Coat of Tietjen whispering into the room. Soon she runs through the corridor with a frankincense barrel while spreading the divine message.

This effect soon evaporates because it remains with these repetitive gestures. Too bad, because this narrow book is really big. The attraction of Debré’s novel lies in the seduction of experiencing the construct of gender and appears to be made for the scenic performance. It is a kind of tipping figure that the performance of gender – man, woman, what is it? – makes you tangible. The pleasure of the game looks dissociating like a pill -expanding pill. The intoxication is horny.

Ascetic lifestyle: swimming in the morning, otherwise writing. Always write.

This intoxication does not transmit itself, but is more inhibited by the shimmering music and the stretched way of talk. There is a lack of pace at which things break in about the narrator, because her game does not escape the rules of the old, huge world. “The reality is that a judge makes me a mother with an electronic boast.”

Why? She desires women, that’s it. A woman with a child and a mighty, offspring man is apparently not allowed. Incomprehensible photos with her friends and son are considered evidence of pedophile tendencies, she goes by. For four years she sees her son only under legally predetermined conditions.

But she doesn’t mean this world that she wants to criminalize. Rather, she gutted her with clarified humor without becoming cynical or insensitive. Tietjen skilfully plays this humor in almost throwing gestures, which show their increasing disinterest in clinging lovers and patriarchy at all. It is laughed every now and then. But the text does not deserve the tendency towards co -conducting sensitivity.

The fear that she can lose her son is the engine of the text. Everything she says can be used in the trial against her. She is advised against the publication. Write something else, the friends say, we also tell her, tied up like in the Kasperletheater – and we are still happy that she wrote it. Because this fear is not normal. But everything Debré says.

Wey’s performance covers fear with the celebration of a lifestyle. For whatever reason, in the end balloons are distributed in the hall and a few more songs are sung, melancholic, but also as if there is something to celebrate. Just what – the loss of the son, or the emancipation from love? There is definitely a profit in this ambiguity.

Next performances: 10.4., 3. and 10.5.

www.volksbuehne.berlin