Einfach das Ende der Welt

What is home? At the beginning of this production from Zurich, Benjamin answers this question in a heart-rending manner. Before he sets out, he imagines his parental home as it was in his childhood. Everything is still there: the flowery wallpaper, the shag carpet, the video tapes, the collection of shells. Over an expansive, suspenseful first half hour, Benjamin – who is not a writer as in Jean-Luc Lagarce’s play, but rather a video artist – does nothing more than record this flat with his camera, internalising it and visualising it in images. The realism of memories becomes more and more insubstantial, finally turning surreal as it is meticulously concretised in close-ups and details. This exposition is rendered even more intense by the driving live sound of drummer Matze Pröllochs – whose character also turns out to be a phantasm, the remembered character of Benjamin’s late husband.

Following a short set-change interval, the acting area is empty, the scenery piled up by the walls, with its rough rear side showing. A space like a provisional sparring. Any truly lived life adheres to it only in memory.

The present is hard and sparse in this production: The past is suspended, in both meanings of the word. Christopher Rüping ruthlessly excavates the inescapable loneliness that traps the characters: the mutual lack of understanding, the projections, the subjective truths, the clipped memories. These characters are guided by idealisation and suppression: Ulrike Krumbiegel’s manipulative, childish mother, the good-will-sister-in-law clod of Maja Beckmann, Nils Kahnwald’s brother, weary of self-sacrifice, Wiebke Mollenhauer’s little sister, disappointed in her ardent love for her big brother and, of course, the arrogant Small Town Boy of Benjamin Lillie. The confrontation between the two unequal brothers ends up in a heated showdown, which incidentally challenges all prejudice towards the so-called provinces. Nothing is ever unambiguous in this performance, no solution is in sight, points-of-view shift continually and form the most beautiful web of family relations.