Tonight, on 17 May at 7.30 p.m., the theatrical sensation of this season is being shown to a sold-out house at the Deutsches Theater Berlin. The second performance is tomorrow, 18 May, and that one is sold out too. We mention this not so that people can still buy tickets — that is no longer possible — but to encourage the whole world to invite this extraordinary piece. The Kammerspiele München will sadly no longer be able to stage it, because they cannot afford to pay so many guest performers, as none of the actors are permanent members of the ensemble there — just as actors of African descent are rarely found as permanent ensemble members in German companies at all. https://www.1on1on1.tv/ernest-allan-hausmann Two years ago, Anna-Sophie Mahler's adaptation of Joseph Bierbichler's novel "Mittelreich" was invited to the Theatertreffen: a quiet music-theatre evening deconstructing the notions of home and family, spanning three generations of an Upper Bavarian innkeeping family. In the tradition of Appropriation Art, which in the late 1970s called into question the normative categories of the art world, director Anta Helena Recke copies this production, yet changes one significant detail: her cast consists exclusively of actors of colour. For the first time on a German municipal-theatre stage, the production appropriates a "white" work in this form in order to address it through a seemingly simple question: what is different when a Black cast performs instead of a white one? While on stage the themes already negotiated by Bierbichler/Mahler — privilege, exclusion and repression — are set resonating anew and twofold, the "copy" demands a reflection on our own patterns of perception, as well as on the institution of theatre and its structural racisms.
Mittelreich
