“Love Boulevard” on the Berliner Ensemble: Little Crimson Driving Hood as a suitor fantasy

“Howdy, mother,” the younger actress Philine Schmölzer speaks into an imaginary phone, “I’m glad to listen to your voice.” No, no, every thing is ok, she hastens to guarantee herself, tears welling up in her eyes. The persons are “good”, however the days are “lengthy”, and naturally she usually goes to events to “current herself”.

However no, she immediately says decisively: “In fact I’m not an object. I’m an actress.” The truth that Schmölzer is carrying a brief gown that performs offensively along with his nightgown enchantment should be understood as a necessary assertion of this unusual night within the New Home of the Berliner Ensemble.

However first issues first. It’s a play known as “Love Boulevard”, which the Belgian director Lies Pauwels produced along with 4 intercourse staff (Violet Black, Mare D’Angosto, Golden Homosexual and Ivy Gray) and three BE actresses (Kathleen Morgeneyer, Josefin Platt and others). Schmölzer) created.

Pauwels, who’s also referred to as a performer from Alain Platel’s evenings, is unquestionably about an “encounter with the actors’ lives,” as dramaturg Amely Joana Haag kindly emphasizes in this system booklet.

This isn’t meant to be documentary

Nevertheless, apparently not in a documentary sense. Other than just a few suspected john fantasies, you hardly be taught something concrete in regards to the intercourse staff’ on a regular basis working life. And with regard to the theater world, the night with the “Howdy Mother” telephone name has already exhausted its concrete potential.

That wouldn’t be an issue in any respect – if “Love Boulevard” got here up with one thing aside from proclaiming theses about dramatic artwork within the tone of conviction about innovation, which in the present day are not more likely to lure folks out from behind the range who’ve by no means set foot in a theater: “It There isn’t a clear boundary between authenticity and efficiency.” That is accompanied, as a co-guardrail, so to talk, by the selective assertion of parallelism between intercourse work and appearing: “Performing as if is a part of all of our work,” the actors announce.

Intercourse robotics and concern of getting older

Enriched with subjects equivalent to concern of getting older, loneliness and even sexual robotics, this thesis will not be differentiated on stage, however, quite the opposite, is intentionally obscured by the full-length manufacturing of maximally ambivalent characters.

Along with the border between efficiency and “authenticity”, Pauwels and the ensemble apparently additionally wish to current the border between pleasure and ache, between self-assertion and projection, between love and repair in addition to innocent play and bitter seriousness as fragile – and in doing so get twisted up in clichés that the Night, if we understood accurately, wished to penetrate.

When the actors, wearing underwear and engrossed in books, lounge lasciviously on stage for minutes and absentmindedly stretch their nylon-stockinged legs into the air as in the event that they had been attempting to re-enact essentially the most awkward Lolita fantasy from the Nineteen Fifties, at the very least girls can try this I discover it fairly irritating, however in an unintentionally humorous sense reasonably than in an insightful sense.

And what precisely is she requested to do when an actress immediately tears off her Little Crimson Driving Hood costume – a well-liked suitor fantasy, as we be taught – and trembles in an ecstatic nude choreography, simply as loads of ecstatic appearing goes on on this continuous 120- minutes? “I hold forgetting what I’m speculated to do right here,” a performer as soon as says in regards to the ramp. It’s truly – and talking fully with out irony – essentially the most relatable sentence of the night.