Testament

When Shakespeare’s King Lear retires and divides his kingdom between his three daughters he experiences a powerful disappointment: there is a disastrous lack of reciprocation. None of the daughters seems to love the old man adequately in return.

The performance group She She Pop use this dramatic motif as the basis for an unusual evening of documentary theatre: the performers stand on stage – occasionally supported by sole male company member Sebastian Bark – together with their own fathers and expose their personal inter-generational contracts without mercy. Childless daughters reflect on compensation payments for the hours their fathers devote to helping nieces and nephews with their homework. Fathers are expected to require care and daughters criticized for their choice of performance as a career.

The fact that this extremely personal evening never turns into navel-gazing, but rather the opposite – it continually touches on phenomena which affect everyone – is due not least to its well-considered use of the Shakespeare text. The five act play serves as a wrapper for the entire evening; all the (documentary) subjects considered on stage are developed purely from it. Apart from this, She She Pop and their fathers dare to do something which is rarely seen in the theatre to this extent: they allow themselves to be questioned; quite specifically and without any safety net.

Christine Wahl