(Wutbürger = Enraged citizen – word of the year 2010)

andcompany&Co.’s idea of choosing one of the most successful productions of Göttingen’s Filmaufbau GmbH, the 1957 film „Wir Wunderkinder“, as a basis for a new revue-like satire of Germany, has stood the test: thanks to the initiative of the new head dramaturge, Lutz Keßler, Deutsches Theater Göttingen presents a new yet familiar production by andcompany&Co, whose anarchical memorial evenings (“Mausoleum Buffo”, “Little Red (Play): Herstory”) have won them a growing fan base.
To the municipal theatre, they brought their collaborative approach to work as well as their precise sense of sound and rhythm (Sascha Sulimma), their idiosyncratic stage aesthetics – the play of written text and two-dimensionality, which Brecht used to love already in Caspar Neher -, the seemingly childlike props and signs made of paper-maché and plywood, as well as their intriguing play with imperfection.

This “Revue”, too, attends on us with lateral associative thinking, unexpected connections, anarchic fantasy, and a ludicrous mood for play. After getting their remarkable German-Brasilian production of Brecht’s “Fatzer” in Sao Paulo and Berlin going, andcompany&Co. members worked with a theatrical ensemble in Göttingen for the first time as directors, where Alexander Karschnia and Nicola Nord do not themselves appear on stage. The performance succeeds in taking audiences on a temponautical journey, where everything is temporally out of joint: Hilter and Sarrazin, Peter Alexander and Lena Meyer-Landrut, Guttenberg and Adenauer. The group keeps surprising us with a flood of weird associations, illuminating punch-lines, corny jokes and unexpected inspirations: “Wutbürger – is that something edible?” – “Hitler was the first Wutbürger.” – “Had native Americans enforced a strict immigration policy and thrown every white man back into the sea, things would be different now with regard to the American Indian Nations.” andcompany’s revue is an amusing evening about a less amusing view on German history, which expands the parody of the 50s to the present. All this happens around the skeleton of a house (Baugerüst oder Hausrohbau?) in the colours of the German flag with a stuffy rustic fence on top (stage design by Jan Brokof).

As with all of the collective’s productions, it becomes clear that we have not arrived in a peacefully-liberal democracy but in a society of hypocritical movers and shakers, of embitterment about growing (instead of decreasing) social schisms, where one increasingly becomes aware that many problems in their scope may hardly be resolved. The other “traditions” of anarchy, insurrection, memories of communism are part of the picture – however, not as ideological trumpet blasts but rather as pauses for thought.

In the midst of satire, there are suddenly moments where the Yiddish song “O mein Papa war eine wunderbare Clown, o mein Papa war eine große Kinstler …” (“O my daddy was a wonderful clown, o my daddy was a great artist…”) has a touching quality, like a portent of German-Jewish history of disaster and murder. A German 9/11 is part of it, too – the fateful date in German history, November 9, is alluded to time and again: Bavarian Soviet Republic in Munich, Nazi memorial day for fallen soldiers since 1933, Crystal Night, fall of the Berlin wall. And, as chance would have it, it was on a 9th of November that a student protest against “the mustiness of a thousand years” under academic gowns was held, that a bomb went off in front of the Jewish community hall in West-Berlin, and that RAF member Holger Meins died in a hunger strike in 1974. Everything is constantly mixed with farcical nonsense in a refreshing way, which balances out the heavy weight of the topics. Thus, a Hitler-Bruno-Ganz figure keeps repeating the same sentence from the film “The Downfall” – first in reaction to news about the collapse of sectors in 1945, but then to all possible topics: “Steiner’s attack will make everything OK again” – “Mein Führer, in colloquial terms we are at war” – “Steiner’s attack will make everything OK again.” – “Mein Führer, I was stripped of my doctoral title” – “Steiner’s attack will make everything OK again.”

One can see beautifully scenic politics in the fact that time and again, serious and discursively compatible elements are unawares wired with nonsense and seemingly arbitrary allusions (as in Christoph Schlingensief’s theatre, one of the models for this method). The shift from Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer to Deutsches Theater Göttingen has been successful. And we are curious to know where the road, the ways of this unique performance collective, shall lead from here.