Kill your Darlings! Streets of Berladelphia

René Pollesch departs from Bertolt Brecht’s ’Fatzer’ fragment not only cleverly but also casually and reinterprets the highly interference-prone relationship of the individual to the collective under contemporary conditions. No-one ever managed to move so resonantly and on so many levels from the ‘Decline of the Egotist Fatzer’ to the impossible exit of the individualist Hinrichs. Brecht’s rhetoric of workers’ choruses and class struggle, together with its excursions into contemporary theatre, is only one of the possible levels on which one can read this complex evening. On a second, visual level, classical scenic references assemble themselves into a form of retrospective of theatrical efforts at representation and revolution. On a third level, Pollesch grabs us by our desire to be loved exclusively and on a fourth, the remarkable Fabian Hinrichs who manages to wring entirely new tones out of the Pollesch sound, abseils down from the flies. That network sport also works as an effective anti-depressant amid all these meta-level acrobatics may not be politically correct. But it is wonderful.

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