The Marriage of Maria Braun

Thirty years after the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany Rainer Werner Fassbinder took a critical look at the years of the post-war economic miracle. His film “Die Ehe der Maria Braun” shows a society in which material wealth is on the up, but at the end even the emancipated and self-made woman Maria Braun is forced to acknowledge that she herself has been no more than a commodity in a collusive male game. In this pacy production at Munich’s Kammerspiele, Thomas Ostermeier is able to draw on five marvellous actors who play all the characters and are able even to switch sexes with remarkable ease. Brigitte Hobmeier is as confident, sexy and untouchable as Hanna Schygulla once was in the original Fassbinder film that made her an international star.

With his linear narrative and elegant but highly comic stage adaptation Ostermeier does not make any attempt to modernise the play, and yet the Maria Braun of his gender study of the 1950s looks just like a precursor of today’s “me plc” one-woman businesses.