Das Werk / Im Bus / Ein Sturz [The Works / On the Bus …

Karin Beier combines three Jelinek plays into one powerful, apocalyptically swelling assessment of humanity. Human hubris and lack of responsibility runs through ‘The Works’, ‘On the Bus’ and ‘A Fall’ like a blood-red thread – from the construction of a power station in the Austrian Alps to the crater in a Munich building site to the collapsing shaft of the Cologne underground. Nature strikes back! And the perpetrators at their desks arrange their files while they sink into the pit which they dug themselves. Beier meets Jelinek with the force of ancient tragedy and biting wit of the satyr plays, with Dionysian orgies and mystical services of mourning. She displays a sense of timing, rhythm, humour and kitsch. She raises her game and pitches the evening into an intoxicated fury of despair at death and redemptive music from worker’s marches to a pas de deux of the elements water and earth. She unleashes a choral oratorio of words the like of which has not been seen since Einar Schleef and morphs the fatal inadequacies of local Cologne politics into tragicomic universality. City theatre in the best sense of the word. Overwhelming theatre in keeping with the spirit of the times.

Vasco Boenisch