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  • Vote for “Heute: Kohlhaas” / “Today: Kohlhaas”


    Political theatre in the best sense of the word. The play presents a group of present-day travelling players who are staging an adaptation of Heinrich von Kleist’s story of Michael Kohlhaas. It deals with the oppression by corrupt rulers. Nothing is simplified into banality. The complexity and complicity of the original story is retained and further underscored with poems by Erich Mühsam. Both the story and the lives of the travelling players are told by the company of five actors (two women and three men), with music and song and a twinkle in their eye, simultaneously fleet-footed and with a touch of melancholy. The show is poetic and political, coarse and clean. It’s not about perfection and empty effects. On this stage nothing is new and highly polished.

    The play and interplay between the characters in their many different roles and narrative forms works extraordinarily well. Time and time again images or scenes start off in a light-hearted, witty manner and then almost without noticing it we are suddenly thrown into a extremely serious situation which forces us to swallow our laughter.

    The impressive overall picture is heightened by the musicality of the whole production and the quality of the musical presentation which features instruments and multipart singing.

    The stories of Michael Kohlhaas and the travelling players are told simultaneously and without bias towards either side. All the players are constantly taking on new roles and their ensemble spirit makes the whole show more than the sum of its individual parts. We are continually confronted by parallel actions: whilst one person is doing one thing the next scene is already being prepared, and the two mesh seemingly accidentally yet perfectly with one another. All the performances are precise and unpretentious at the same time: wonderful.

    Helmut Wenderoth