Premiere in Cologne: Laughter against mindfulness – culture
What do you do when someone is obsessed with their own bowel movements? You form a circle of chairs, of course: surrounded by the rest of the staff of the “Imaginary Invalid”, with a Louis XIV wig and in a soiled nightgown, Rosa Eskat writhes as Molière’s Argan on the equally soiled chaise longue. Later she will crouch on a bucket to substantiate her sophisticated faecal rhetoric (“full intestines make loins lame”).
Of course, Stefan Bachmann knows that the potential for shit and fart jokes in this indestructible hypochondriac piece is always good for a laugh. The director of the Cologne drama uses the template for his production in the Mühlheimer Depot 2 to the best of his ability. The city itself gets a bit of a stool (“Colon, Colonia, Cologne. This ongoing anal colonization is nowhere more at home than in this city of Cologne.”) And – spoiler alert – the closing punchline is also a fart – quiet but deadly. An hour and a half of Pupash humor too?
Not quite. The other element of Molière’s “overwriting” by the Zurich author duo Barbara Sommer and Plinio Bachmann, which is not necessarily linked to the permanent obsession with the gut, is a satire on the language of politically correct trigger warners. The incarnation of this rhetoric is the lover of Argan’s daughter Angélique, Cleánte, played here by Lola Klamroth. This nervously twitching young man in wire-rimmed glasses is a constant stream of mindful inclusion sayings from himself. He thinks it’s “nice that I can feel meant to be there”, he would like to be able to presuppose “Hen, Hyn and Ham” as “pronouns for people with non-binary gender identity” and based on the “five c’s” (context, communication, approval, choreography and closure), how to prevent abusive boundary crossings in acting.
Against diversity? Against lateral thinkers? One way or another, there will be laughter
One could understand this cabaret-like satire as a backlash against the awakened German contemporary theater with its high ethical standards and precarious audience ratings in places, but the authors have prevented that. Meta-self-observation is also inscribed in the production, when Cléante warns of “crude cross-gender cast” and would rather have something gender fluid “so as not to fall into the trap of incorrect assignments and definitions”. Bachmann’s own cross-gender cast – Cléante, Doktor Purgon and Argan played by women, Argan’s wife and daughter, Béline and Angélique, by male ensemble members Paul Basonga and Kei Muramoto – is itself criticized as not being sufficiently diverse and open, albeit (birefringence!) quite irresponsible.
At the same time, the vaccination deniers notice when Kais Setti as Béralde launches an all-out attack against the medical profession, which his brother Argan admires so much: “The conventional medical cartel is not at all interested in real healing – what they want is to market the idea of healing, While they pump their patients full of drugs, the effects of which they can’t exactly assess.” So that nobody here gets the idea that one is politically one-sided.
Ultimately, the strange impression of a quasi-folk comedy with anal fetish arises, which gives both the diversity and the lateral thinker lobby verbal kicks in the ass. Viewers who might misinterpret this as part of a real culture war can calm down with the fact that after a tight hour and a half of play you can go outside to a toilet labeled “divers”. One way or another, people laugh, and that’s always the most important thing in Cologne anyway.