Riesenbutzbach. Eine Dauerkolonie

After the crisis the men don’t even have a car any more. They stay in empty garages where nothing will start, least of all a motor for growth. The women, meanwhile, sit in the hall of an “Institute of Fermentation” where nothing is fermenting any more, taking their heartbroken leave of the pawned furniture. Their credit has vanished into thin air and the Swiss bank official will definitely not be able to open the vault again. Hopelessness and inertia were always the ingredients of Christoph Marthaler and Anna Viebrock’s theatre but this was never as close to reality as it is here in “Riesenbutzbach”. The global village is ruled by a corpulent “singing inspector” who guides the dispossessed middle classes to the heights of Bach, Schubert, Mahler and Beethoven, when they are not in the garage dancing behind his back to the disco hit “Staying Alive”. In the end, German song is impossible: Schubert’s “Winterreise” crumbles on Christoph Homberger’s lips. There can be no more telling and more amusing articulation of the depression of our times.