See the world before it’s gone
November 1, 2024. In her first play, the writer Nora Bossong tells knowledgeably and poetically about sericulture in the Ruhr area during the Nazi era. Director Kathrin Mädler premieres the material.
Von Dorothea Marcus
November 1, 2024. They are white, somehow padded, twitching cutely as they work on the video screen: the silkworms, eager little animals that eat around 60 kilograms of mulberry tree leaves in their lives and spin 800 meters of precious thread per hour. The three actors who soon roll and crawl onto the stage look like silkworms: eyes painted white, padded white clothes – and at the same time their outfit with a tie and shorts is reminiscent of a Hitler Youth uniform.
It is 1936, that “year of departure”. Schorsch (David Lau) and Gustav (Philipp Quest), mining buddies, want to escape the drudgery underground by raising silkworms: “Now everything is possible, even for us!” Only Lotte, who is regularly mistreated by her husband Schorsch when he has drunk his money again, is plagued by dark premonitions: Simin Soraya plays her like a somnambulist seer, she already senses the downfall.
On to the supply battle!
But at first everything goes well. Who would have thought that sericulture was publicly supported in the Ruhr area, that it provided essential material for parachutes as “part of the agricultural supply battle” and that it reduced unemployment in the region? In fact, in Gelsenkirchen, barely 20 kilometers from the Oberhausen Theater, silk was produced on a large scale in the 1930s on so-called “Grabeland” – wasteland in the city.
When the award-winning novelist Nora Bossong was in the Ruhr area in 2023 as a metropolitan writer, she came across the topic and was inspired to write her first play. It is now being staged by the Oberhausen director Kathrin Mädler. Franziska Isensee has placed a huge typesetting box, a kind of multifunctional shelf, on the stage, half covered with a huge, silky parachute: combat equipment and projection surface at the same time, stage directions or venues are repeatedly displayed on it.
Individual compartments appear like cramped life prisons – or mine shafts – when the actors wedge themselves into them, but soon the lighting expands the space, at the same time trap doors open or the back wall later falls away: the new life, the trio’s bourgeois rise to more Space in the new house that was forcibly bought from the Jew was bought through the suffering of others. Eagerly and with shining eyes, the three reproduce the omnipresent Nazi propaganda: little human animals without an overview.
For the cause
A strong, interesting symbol is the silkworms that the actors have turned into. On the one hand they represent the misery and tinyness of humanity, on the other hand they represent the longing for luxury and a better life. Or as Gustav puts it: “The entire people is like breeding caterpillars. Sacrificing themselves for the cause. The silk. The victory.”
A “chorus”, embodied by Daniel Rothaug in a dark uniform, sets the historical and local context, be it the triumphant announcements at “enlightenment meetings” about now being able to take part in the “economic development work of the leader”, or – later in the piece – the current death rates during the war years. Gelsenkirchen: alone 1402 in 1942. Nora Bossong has delved deep into the Gelsenkirchen city archives and yet she finds a floating tone that sets a larger framework: How could a society go so wrong, into the abyss?
And so we follow Gustav, Schorsch and Lotte through the Nazi years, seeing them proudly reproduce propaganda, celebrating their ruthless rise, only occasionally stopped by the hesitant Lotte – while the impending world war apocalypse lurks in many sentences. “I would have liked to see the world before it was gone,” Lotte once said when Schorsch wanted to take her to Paris. Siren-like, dragging warning sounds interrupt the individual scenes, each only hinting at the course of the story and setting small psychological and historical highlights.
No ground under your feet
This piece is well constructed, director Kathrin Mädler found good images: at one point the “chorus” contorts itself while hanging on the shelf to form a swastika, at another the human caterpillars lie on their backs and trample on the ceiling with a dark sound. The world is tumbling into war and has lost its footing. The actors play well, even if they could have screamed less and put more calm into the psychological scenes. The piece is actually an unfortunate love triangle story.
And even if the evening is a little long due to the formal typesetting box restrictions, a clever, historical and at the same time poetic evening has emerged here in Oberhausen, in which the local, everyday life with the force of guilt, the small will to upward mobility of the real citizens world history merges. An evening that shows that the great lies in the smallest insects. And that this is the only way we will be able to understand it.
Grabeland
by Nora Bossong
premiere
Director: Kathrin Mädler, stage and costumes: Franziska Isensee, music, sound and video: Cico Beck, dramaturgy: Saskia Zinsser-Krys.
With: David Lau, Daniel Rothaug, Simin Soraya, Philipp Quest.
Premieres October 31, 2024
Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes, no break
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