Theater: “Death Drive” at the Volksbühne Berlin: Stop Hating Sense!

The dead sit in the front row: skeletons from the anatomical collection stare at five men in gray monk’s robes, who are equipped with percussion and brass instruments. This is followed by easy listening and a couple’s dance in varying sex positions: Steven Fast and Kyle Patrick produce a gigantic egg, which they pull onto the stage post-coital. Benny Claessens, Kathrin Angerer and Susanne Bredehöft slip out of there in beige dresses. This is how “Death Drive”, the first production by the Belgian director Benjamin Abel Meirhaeghe, begins at the Volksbühne. Subtitle: “Everything Everyone Ever Did”. We remain in a mystical realm with booms and howls.

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What follows for 100 minutes is a kind of ritual dance. There is a lot of dancing, at least noticeable movement, and very rarely speaking. The actors build small nests – or are they Easter fire constructions? – for eggs, wearing midsommar dresses. Visually, a lot is happening on stage: the costumes are constantly changing. Curtains: What they usually have in common is a hole in the middle. In the foyer, the interpretation is later suggested that everything should be understood as one long anal joke. Perhaps the lack of interest shown in the context of action is also a partiality for futility.

In front of a curtain with flowers in a beer glass, Susanne Bredehöft tells the story of a man who set out only to find that there was only a pile of rabbit shit waiting for him at the end of the street. Funeral soil from metal buckets is thrown around. Katharina Angerer speaks a cosmological monologue in a child’s voice that ends with: “I’ve seen everything. / There’s nothing left to see.” In the same scene, the actors waddle with tortillas while having water in their mouths. Inga Busch suddenly sings a lullaby in the Nina Hagen style. Towards the end, Claessens waddles around as a good God with a bushy beard, then disappears with sweatpants and bubble tea. Before that, the band Beat’n Blow played “Final Countdown” in front of the stage. In general, the musicians have a lot to do: play the funeral march like “My Way”.

Pre-slapstick jokes regularly make the audience laugh. A visitor even secretly films while the performers stalk and stomp across the stage in a fashion show march. A guest claims to have cried three times because something like that is possible in the theater and not just pseudo-intellectual nonsense. A few people also leave the hall. Recommended reading material for the evening includes Nietzsche, Viriginia Woolf and the psychoanalyst Sabina Spielrein. The cocaineist, neurologist and patriarch Sigmund Freud, discoverer of the death instinct, is missing. According to Schumpeter, creative destruction is the innovation engine of capitalism. That perhaps plays a role, as do death rites and nihilism itself. The evening at the Volksbühne remains a loose, self-referential spectacle where there is a bit of giggling: ideas for the initiated and hardened.

Next performances: November 27th, December 3rd, December 26th

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