Kasimir and Karoline

“Enjoy” is spelled out in glittering golden letters which hang above the stage and a chic Opel car in this Horváth production. However the joyful mood of Oktoberfest and its sentimental gloss are emphatically banished from the play. Markus John as a greasy-haired Kasimir and Angelika Richter in the role of a more cunning than smart Karoline are the stars of the evening. One can see that Richter’s Karoline would like to “step up” socially, as Horváth puts it, because she likes walking around on the first floor of Bert Neumann’s stage among the glittery “Enjoy” letters. She always speaks a little too shrilly into her body mic to be plausible as a sweet, bubbly girl. Markus John’s Kasimir is a strong guy with shaggy hair and stubble who is too coarse and too well fed for a Don Quixote, to whom he is compared in the play. Simons takes an equally cold view of both bosses and losers, he presents the underprivileged not as theatrical battle horses but real untamed lower class predators and gutter life. For him critiquing capitalism does not mean embracing the lower classes, but rather the intelligent, warm-hearted and almost scientific consideration of individuals on a case by case basis.