"Guv'nor, who am I? One of them as has nothing. I can't afford a thing. And yet a bloke like me needs just as much as one of them right at the top. More, even. I'm just as big an eater, but I drink a fair bit more, so I can bear my lot at all. And that costs me just as much as one of the upper ten thousand. — So I'm asking you, don't go playing games with me."
We think the binman Dollmeier ought to explain to the Bundestag why lower earners should not simply be fobbed off with a 300-euro energy lump sum.
This comedy after George Bernard Shaw's "Pygmalion" has been newly translated and reshaped by Florian Battermann.
The play is best known in its musical adaptation, "MY FAIR LADY" — funny, romantic and full of unforgettable melodies. Shaw, however, had conceived his play quite differently: as a social satire on polite society — class struggle and female empowerment included. In 1925 the author received the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work. The modernised version "KAUZ UND CHAOTIN", set in present-day Berlin, vividly demonstrates that, even 110 years after its premiere, the comedy remains thoroughly amusing and contemporary. Not least because the plot encourages us not to judge a person by their appearance but to view them as a whole, rather than just the part of their character that happens to seem useful.
A production by the Komödie am Altstadtmarkt, now on tour and in Braunschweig from 28 October to 20 November 2022.