Each sentence a riddle, an abstract assertion or a quote. For 150 minutes, Susanne Kennedy has a vocal playback in her play women in trouble on Berlin folk stage, to which actresses move ir lips with no voice. The facial skin masks in which y are inserted reduce minefield to a mechanical minimum. All this takes place in front of a stage set that turns like a huge moodboard of futuristic surface designer through room – plastiniert, checkered, tiled and with Blubbertapete.
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The program note on piece tells something about “post-human reality”. So to human, molecular, to some future it should go – but se terms, just like space-ship-like revolving stage, are just a semiotic dummy.
Everything about women in trouble is wrong. You see alienated people who do not understand text y are talking about. You can see and hear a whole apparatus of optical and textual references that have lost every point of reference: slogans from Old Testament, from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s anti-Oedipus from 1972, from advertising and Selbstoptimierungssprech of present, whose Messages are so corny that y do not convey anything concrete, except a rar vague impression. Maybe this is vibe of present. But perhaps only vibe of a present, as contemporary art has constructed and reflected above all in past five to ten years.
Women in trouble, first big house production on Chris Dercons folk stage, is not really about future, contrary to claims from program booklet. The questions that Susanne Kennedy’s piece raises are all aimed at that now. How are we to endure this present? and related to women mentioned in title: What is Your trouble and how do you keep it?
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Not quite effortlessly viewer finds out after a while – or simply reads it in leaflet – that this play is constructed around a cancer patient and her Doppelgängerinnen, “which fall from one reality to or”. These realities are first and foremost speaking situations that are marked as typical female: How do I explain to my mor that her feminism was already quite in order, but I do not want to make quite as many compromises in my ambitions? How do I react to jovial casting director who doesn’t ask me any sexist questions, but still treats me like a mindless machine? What do I do with boyfriend, who often speaks of his great feelings, but so that he always thinks of himself and who really never wants to commit himself?
Where women’s problems lie, this is evident in Kennedy’s piece of men: y never behave as if y didn’t know what y wanted. Annoyed, goal-oriented, disinterested, impatient y are – but never uncertain. The staging doesn’t leave you much, but a little bit more leeway for comedy and personal expression. With a world in which re seems to be hardly any community between people, Softboys here seem to have no problem at all. The emotional work that is still to be done in this really emotionless world, despite everything, must continue to afford women.
At least conform to usual cliché
And women take it to heart: The reference chaos on which play is based, y do not let mselves bounce off, but act on mselves. You don’t know who you are or want to be. That y have a cheerful charisma, y do not learn from mselves, but from neurotic observation of ir environment. “Tell me that I’m hysterical because I’m pregnant” is a phrase somewhere in middle. The woman wants to be confirmed by a man that she at least meets grossest of his clichés. But man who’s been approached, he just turns disgusted away.
Everything that has happened since Dercons takeover on popular stage means an inversion of discursive spectacle atre that Frank Castorf has coined here for a quarter of a century. At first glance, Susanne Kennedy’s work can be categorized into precisely this reversal: expressiveness, emotion, arousal, acting overturning and charisma – se attributes, in which ensemble of folk stage had increased ever furr, y are Imploded.
This extreme reduction of atrical means certainly does not make it easy for spectator. She makes women in trouble subtle, but also in an agonizingly interesting way. Certainly piece has lengths and in many microdialogs that are uniformly stringing, one can wonder wher y only simulate a deeper context. But alone, because one can load piece with such questions, only for fine perception that it demands spectator, is worth visit.
Also on old folk stage re was boredom, endless text collages and monotony. Only temperature was higher re and one could hope for a redemption through atrical intensity (which, however, did not always occur). The boredom in Kennedy’s piece is of a variety that makes one doubt: Is this now really just a loose Zitatgedresche or did I just not have enough effort to understand it? The burden of proof lies with spectator, and refore re is no escaping from world that is being claimed: it is bland, smooth and not particularly hopeful. All in all pretty carcinogenic.
