René Pollesch and Fabian Hinrichs: Until no one can stand anyone else anymore!

Five years ago, Fabian Hinrichs was on the verge of death. In Berlin’s Friedrichstadtpalast, following Albert Camus’s “Myth of Sisyphus,” he asked the question of why people don’t kill themselves immediately given the meaninglessness of their own existence. Hanging meters above the stage, as if stopped in free fall, he didn’t provide an answer, but rather evaded it in the most beautiful way: “If you don’t kill yourself, then you’ll ring someone’s doorbell.” Consequently, the biggest question in philosophy is “why you should?” someone’s doorbell rings.”

Not only in this production (“Belief in the possibility of completely renewing the world”), but also in other collaborations with Hinrichs, the social is a significantly less cerebral category than in other work contexts by director René Pollesch. Hinrichs brings something missionary to the works of the artistic director of the Volksbühne, and even banal sentences come out of his mouth sounding like words of wisdom. When he smiles from the stage, gaunt and bare-chested, a religious connotation cannot be overlooked. There is something prophetic about his playing; He promises a way out of misfortune, preaches the simplest means of being human, so that community and ease can return where exploitation, competition and depression had just reigned.

But times have changed. Five years after the work in the Friedrichstadtpalast, as a reference to the Sisyphus myth, there are some boulders on the stage next to the bungalow in which the shared apartment residents Paul and Stefan are arguing with each other. Hinrichs plays them both, constantly changing places. »I think Margaret Thatcher was right. There is no such thing as community!” he shouts at Paul over a wall of packages. And shortly afterwards: “Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!” The healing encounter in this shared apartment is obviously difficult; there is no trace of the pathetic evocation of human closeness anymore. The roommates were still a good team, chatting in the shared living room.

What happened? Big politics got caught up in this idyll, or more precisely: a war, and then another. In one scene, television images from Gaza are playing in the background: destroyed residential areas, soldiers in tunnels. “People talked about it, they didn’t agree,” explains Hinrichs as the narrator, now wrapped in a long black coat. “Something had shifted.”

Hinrichs’ solo “Yes nothing is ok”, which premiered last Sunday at the Volksbühne, is largely about the Middle East war – or more precisely: about its effects on our coexistence. Compulsory confession is rampant on stage. At the beginning, in the dual role of a torturer and his victim, Hinrichs throws himself into a swimming pool, submerges his head under the water, and shouts at himself that he should finally say “it!”

The demand to take a stand poisons the climate, as everyone only acts as thesis carriers and no longer as people. You can take this message from the evening and also criticize it. Because is that really what you want to say about the war in Gaza? That he is ruining the relationships of people in Europe?

The political debate, i.e. what reaches us as an aftereffect of the violence, appears this evening as a hindrance to conversation, the boundaries of discourse as a wall that demarcates the area of ​​combat. The individual is also its victim; he despairs of his smallness and futility. »If you love everyone, why don’t there be consequences? If you love everyone, why doesn’t the world get better?” The escape route from this alienation logically leads to the pre-political era, more precisely to the Proterozoic.

Drawings of arthropods are projected onto a wall of the house, and Hinrichs lectures on the fact that life on earth was still non-violent 560 million years ago. “How can this peace process be revived?” If we understand it correctly, there is no hope, and there can be none, in a political reality based on violence. That means you have to get out.

But how do you get out of politics without turning humanity into arthropods? The answer: art. Pollesch and Hinrichs offer their production as a situational way out of the debates, the violence and the talk about it. And they are successful with it. As questionable as some of the intellectual foundations of this work may seem, you enjoy watching and listening to Hinrichs, and you enjoy being impressed by his playing. A seducer is at work here. He finely balances humor and melancholy and plays cleverly with intensities.

And then there’s the ending, which won’t be revealed here. Just this much: it comes as a surprise, is funny, sad, pathetic. For a few moments you can actually feel seen and heard, sitting there not understanding too much but feeling understood.

Next performances of “Yes nothing is okay” at the Volksbühne: February 15th, February 25th, March 9th, March 23rd.