Director Leander Haußmann has set out for the inclusive RambaZamba theatre to tell, through "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest", of the glamour and misery of the psychiatric ward. A stage party quite unlike any other.
Norbert Stöß appears as guest performer on the premiere night, playing the institution's doctor — or at least believing himself to be, since here the categories are programmatically in free flow.
Unlike the film, things here are not cruel but light-hearted, above all in the scene where the ward's patients sneak out of the institution undercover for an outing. In the Hollywood film they first hijack a bus and then a ship. At RambaZamba, instead, they have shot a neighbourhood movie: Christian Behrend, Anil Merickan, Dirk Nadler, Jonas Sippel, Sebastian Urbanski — they all march through Prenzlauer Berg outside their theatre's front door.
Kitting themselves out — always to the music of "gespenster" from the "Stasikomödie" — with clothes from a suitably hip vintage shop, they are pursued by Franziska Kleinert and Nele Winkler as the tough ward sisters, steal the car of the director who — fiddling with a pimp's chain — leans against the neighbourhood wall in person, and slip past Detlev Buck, who for his part (what else) plays a local beat cop. Enormous fun — and live commentated by the performers, who in this scene take their seats on the steps in the auditorium.
Theater RambaZamba
Director: Leander Haußmann
Premiere on 20 October 2022
Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes, no interval
further performances:
www.rambazamba-theater.de