“The Rue de Lourcine Affair”: Schaubühne: Oha, oha, oha!

The 19th century salon is of course long dead. Today, people are more likely to invite people into the living area within their spacious loft. The manners cultivated there have changed. But are they really that much freer today?

Nobody calls for carriages anymore – at least there is Uber. You definitely won’t run into a coal dealer. However, it is quite likely that you will come across a heat pump installer. But has all of these – ultimately superficial – shifts changed so much about the mental state of the bourgeoisie, about the character of the average upstart and the moneyed aristocrat, about their relationship to their fellow human beings and to the object of their obsessions: money and possessions?

Probably not. And because that is the case, Eugène Labiche’s “The Rue de Lourcine Affair”, a play from the century before last, can be brought to the stage as it was previously written down by its author. A lively translation like that of Elfriede Jelinek is required.

Lenglumé wakes up with a serious hangover. He had gone to a class reunion the night before and got really drunk. Now he has to deal with a film tear – and is really surprised by the man next to him in bed. It is his former classmate Mistingue, who is in a very similar condition to his host.

While searching for the lost memory, they come across a newspaper article: Two fugitive men committed the murder of a coal dealer while intoxicated. The evidence fits together: the coal-black hands, a woman’s shoe that suddenly appeared, a woman’s hairpiece.

Now it’s about everything, maybe not so much about guilt and punishment, but at least about your own painstakingly built existence. All of this continues to gain momentum: until the chain of unfortunate events causes the previously intact façade to collapse – it all turns out not to be a big misunderstanding.

The Berlin Schaubühne at Lehniner Platz has put the piece on its schedule. The premiere was celebrated on Sunday. In 1988, the outstanding director and comic specialist Klaus Michael Grüber staged the drama here. Director Jan Bosse is responsible for the current production.

First, Axel Wandtke, dressed in a tailcoat, enters the scene in the role of the servant Justin, pushes his overflowing trolley across the stage, grabs gifts that aren’t meant for him, and devotes disgruntled attention to his master Lenglumé. He utters an emphatic “Oha!” several times. The performance has humor and esprit. But you won’t laugh as much as you did during this first scene in this 80-minute evening at the theater.

Jan Bosse has directed a French comedy. But a comedy thrives not least on its pace, which cannot be heard in the theater. The director has opted for one or two slapstick numbers. But slapstick needs rhythm to be more than just nonsense. So all that’s left is the acting of several actors who don’t really want to get along. It pushes the players into the light one at a time, but the joke of the scenic self-exposure involves at least two people: the one exposing himself and his spectator.

An oversized bed is on stage. The drunks come out of this and are drawn back here again and again. But if the viewer is scenographically promised a glimpse into the protagonist’s bedroom, they don’t want to be deceived. It doesn’t help: nothing is revealed here beyond what the text has to tell us. Some of the inserted, very graphic foreign texts about the money-obsessed society are unfortunately only well-intentioned in the evening as a whole. We would have liked to have laughed a little more on this comedy evening.

Next performances: March 5th, 6th and 7th

www.schaubuehne.de