Time to Say Goodbye
Rimini Protokoll gives Hamburgs Neues Cinema its last rites
süddeutsche zeitung, TILL BRIEGLEB , 26.04.2003, 4439 Chars
Should you happen to die in Hamburg, make sure that the funeral is held in chapel 8 at the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. It has the best acoustics, says an experienced funeral musician. This is only worth doing, though, if you are expecting mourners who can appreciate it. If your relatives are people who only weep to "Time to say Goodbye", the acoustics won’t matter anyway.
Hans-Dieter Ilgner however has his own ideas. He wants Dixieland at his funeral. And because this theatre evening entitled "Deadline" wants in all seriousness to deprive death of its sting, at this point we hear how Dixieland sounds heard through the thick walls of a pine coffin – a stage death without all the ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’.
The project in Hamburg’s Neues Cinema was created by Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi and Daniel Wetzel, who under various group names such as Rimini Protokoll bring certain topics to the stage based on their researches. These can then be staged in high-rise buildings, in Bonn’s plenary hall or in Argentinean slums. Now they are caricaturing the classic theatre death with a dramaturgy of facts. But how can you entertain an audience with the fact that 55 million people die annually, that almost everyone cries for their Mama just before they die, and that the average stay in a hospice is two to three weeks?
Haug, Kaegi and Wetzel have found protagonists from the professions dealing with death who are fit for the stage and can also walk the delicate tightrope between reverence and gallows humour. In addition to the anonymous funeral musician and former mayor and now funeral innovator Ilgner, there is the moriphile layer-out Alida Schmidt, stone mason Hilmar Gesse and hobby funeral speaker Olav Meyer-Sievers.
Without evading the anxiety associated with the topic, the group develops an info show on the final certainty, which functions most impressively due to its avoidance of philosophical depths and religious ecstasy. That consolation still finds its way in is due to the unsentimental presentation of this piece on death, which enables us to conquer our inner defence against dying with curiosity.
With sober absurdity, Alida Schmidt shows us the seven initial incisions of every anatomical examination and tells us that the corpses wait in threes in vats of alcohol and that peeling away skin sounds like tearing cloth. Olav Meyer-Sievers shows us mourning as stress and hustle and bustle, as the professionals who have to redecorate the funeral parlour hourly experience it. Accompanied by videos from his ‘Flammarium Braubach’, Mr Ilgner tells us how cremation functions technically and that body builders have to burn for twice as long as ordinary mortals.
The intensive research on the process of death and decay is rendered with simple theatrical and visual means but without poppy death-kitsch. We accompany Meyer-Sievers in exploring his family grave using a lifting platform, sounds, photos, and his tales of which of his relatives we will encounter at which exact level and in which condition. The plea for a humane death by widower Werner Brenzel, who is more afraid of appearing on stage than he is of death, is shown on video. And the tongue in cheek re-enactment of the funeral of a mayor in the provincial backwater of the river Rhein in flooding rain leads neatly into everything you always wanted to know about burial at sea.
Documentary theatre, which often looks fairly feeble as the ‘poor relation’ of the television feature, fulfils all expectations of the strength of immediacy in "Deadline". In the inflation of deaths in film, on stage and in the news, which viewers instinctively regard as banal, death suddenly directly re-enters the consciousness as a significant category of life here - a modern, skilful memento mori.
That the evening was however accompanied by ‘oohs’ and ‘ahs’ was not because of the topic but due to the immanent ‘death’ of the stage on which it was played out. "Deadline" is also the end of existence for the Neues Cinema as the creative ‘playground’ of the Hamburger Schauspielhaus. The financial blackout in theatre financing means that the lights will go out forever here at the beginning of May after this production. "Deadline" gave the venue its last rites and is moving on to Hanover and Berlin. But for the Neues Cinema it is finally “Time to say Goodbye”.
Zugehörige Projekte
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