“Simply the end of the world”: Why doesn’t the family want to direct?

Fourth wall? Forget it! A young man (Benjamin Lille) stands in front of an interior designed down to the smallest detail to reflect nineties middle-class normality (stage: Jonathan Mertz), who would not be branded as un-urban in any major western city. He confides to the audience that he is 34, has not visited his family for 12 years – and will die soon, just leave a little earlier. Like a needy motivational coach, Benjamin demands that the audience, whom he blindly converts into accomplices, repeat out loud what he tells us: So we should call after him while he is still alive. Then it’s about us: Benjamin asks whether we would like to go on a long trip again in his situation? Who would rather die alone? Who in the family circle? Hands up!

Benjamin finally turns away from us and takes the video recorder for a walk around his parents’ house, where Formula 1 is still on, window paint is stuck to the windows, the “TV feature film” is being read, and VHS cassettes are piled up. Then, after less than half an hour, the renovation is already underway. When we return, the tranquil idyll turns its back on us: the back of the thing-memories that cannot speak form the boundaries of the plot.

The encounter between son, mother, sister, brother and sister-in-law takes place on an almost empty stage. a study in unforgiveness, narcissism, posed communication, memory management and speaking anxiety begins. Benjamin can freely tell his urban cultural audience that he is sick and that he will soon die, but not his family. The silence sets the plot in motion.

Director Christopher Rüping has reissued his award-winning Zurich production of “Simply the End of the World” for the Deutsches Theater. The piece, written by Jean-Luc Lagarce, who died of AIDS in 1998, is school reading in France. Xavier Dolan, the famous queer French-Canadian director, filmed the material in 2016. Rüping’s version is not a historicizing HIV drama. The fact that the main character is gay is only discussed in passing. Benjamin’s “otherness,” the reason he left the family, abandoned, as it turns out, turns into a brutal protective narcissism: he wants the world to play as he pleases, because he doesn’t himself may know.

No familiar touch is possible with family members, hugging without closeness. Benjamin’s solution: The family has to go into the box! We make videos! He points his video recorder at his relatives and demands that they do the same to him. They become amateur actors, his crew, somehow presentable. But the joy of reunion cannot be simulated. The mother (Corinna Harfouch) comes with champagne and later causes tears. Difficult to bear for the son: the woman does not see herself exclusively as (his) mother – and this expectation causes her to seethe inside, freeze outside, and sometimes explode.

But: Yes, don’t say what you think, what you think of each other. The brother (Nils Kahnwald) is the least likely to keep his aggression behind the fence. The fact that his life as a toolmaker, basketball coach, as a father could be something other than a dull continuation of the same old nuclear family shit, this evil assumption that Benjamin repeatedly personifies for him, develops into the most tense conflict of the evening. Matze (Pröllochs), whom Benjamin in turn declared to be his “great love” and leads to Gigi Agostino on stage, is long dead when the prodigal son returns, as the “left behind” reveals. Benjamin looks into the audience, but fans become fans not help him.

The sister-in-law (Maja Beckmann) puts on a helpless good face to the evil game, and later turns meta-slapstick out of necessity with the prop; But even then the situation doesn’t break down. The little sister (Wiebke Mollenhauer) was looking for a role model in Benjamin and supposedly wants to go away and see and try something different. But isn’t her Banksy sweater too 2012? Wouldn’t she just be embarrassing at Benjamin’s side? With accents like these, costume designer Lene Schwind succeeds in making it possible to experience the subtle differences that separate people.

The abandoned little family has fun in the bathroom in Benjamin’s absence. You smoke weed, you’re exuberant, and as a small community that doesn’t play a role on the world stage, you manage to be a little bit happy for a moment. Benjamin finds this unbearable. Like an offended director, he comes running out of the darkness of the audience and makes it clear: “It’s about me.”

Because its end is “simply the end of the world.” He tries to capture the others in images, cramming them into small scenes for his acting. He will – finally? – openly contemptuous. Benjamin doesn’t want to learn to see himself through the eyes of others, but tries to tease out from them, like a director, what he wants to hear in terms of incomprehension and disappointment. Benjamin Lille plays the lonely seducer of himself in an impressively versatile manner.

The long applause after two and a half hours is the only adequate reaction to this production. The actors create an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere where the discrepancy between feeling, speaking and acting becomes vividly clear. The events on stage are hopeless and unforgiving, yet always hyperactive. An excellent evening, because nothing human is alien to him.

Next performances: 10.2., 11.2.