Applause for “Hader on Ice” in Berlin: Josef Hader and his friend Rudl – Kultur
He renovated a baroque farm. The great Corona novel writer, “a tetralogy in four volumes”. And afterwards a cookbook, “as the next project”. In the Weinviertel. The Weinviertel is the Uckermark of Vienna. A place of longing.
Anyone who, as a wealthy artist or intellectual, can no longer stand it in the city goes there. As well as Joseph Hader, or rather his stage persona. “Beet fields to the horizon, a whole ocean,” he enthuses. “Brown, dirty, streaked with plastic sheeting – just like the real sea.”
The maturity was worth it
The cabaret artist took 17 years to write his solo “Hader on Ice”. The maturity was worth it. Anger was never better, badder, sadder, tenderer, more desperate than in the show, which is now showing eight sold-out evenings at Berlin’s Babylon cinema.
The show, which consists of two one-hour acts each, is framed by Dean Martin songs. Softened and retro. The crooner, feared because of his sobbing voice, was a much more harmless stage drinker than the stage quarrel, which slipped into the unreal.
With a glass of rum in hand, he babbles self-righteously and sentimentally. A boomer asshole like no other. “Born at exactly the right time to eat everything away for the next generation and finally die pain-free.”
A Hader program is not just cabaret, but also acting. His suada of accusatory futility changes themes such as postures and vocal tones. Sometimes he thunders cannonades into the audience. About waiters, filter coffee, parcel carriers. “There weren’t as many messengers as there are today, even in the Middle Ages. We have epidemics and beheadings again. What’s next: cheese and ham toast, burning witches?”
Sometimes, in a soft child’s voice, he becomes a whispering Sepperl who remembers the horror stories with which the priest once treated him. He dances, grimaces, rummages around in front of the stage for bottles. Imitates Oskar Werner’s heart attack death from the film “The Ship of Fools” and hits his nasal idiom extremely well.
Rudl the wolf, his only friend
In virtuosic changes of keywords, it goes from the banal contemporary phenomena to the serious ones – belief in conspiracies, Corona, poverty, refugees, climate – and to being human itself. The sympathy that everyone is only able to muster to a limited extent: “With yourself, yes, but not with people who are begging on the ground or are drowning in the Mediterranean.” Or the fear of death and old age. “You become like a baby again, lying there helpless. Only then no one will love you anymore.”
[Babylon Mitte, bis 29. Januar (ausverkauft), Zusatztermine: 4.-6. Februar]
“Hader on Ice” is brilliantly written and rehearsed. Including hangers and text doublets of the out of style drunkard ego. And then the polyphonic quarrel also leads to dialogues. They surprise you with a surprising, surreal twist. Like James Stewart in Harvey, Hader befriends an animal.
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Not a giant rabbit, but a giant wolf, the terror of the provinces. Rudolf, called Rudl, borrowed his voice from Tom Waits. He and Hader have an obvious enemy. Who needs people when you can sit with a wolf over five kilos of beef carpaccio? Although Hader actually announced in the first act that he was an ethical vegetarian. “I only eat animals that don’t scream when you kill them. Fish or lobster, no problem!”
Rudl’s crude insults are good for liberated laughter. In the sottis of the drunkard, the laughter of self-knowledge gets stuck in the throat. Again and again. The horror of the furiously presented mental neglect of the affluent man goes deeper than ever in the joke cabaret. At the end, Halder and Rudel sing a fragile duet on the harmonium. “Somewhere Over The Rainbow,” oh yeah. Thunderous applause.