Berlin Alexanderplatz (review)

In a German cultural scene permeated by knowing irony and self-reflexive theatricality, Volker Lösch insists unfashionably on politics. In 2004, he staged Die Dresdner Weber, which combined elements of Die Weber, Gerhart Hauptmann's historical drama of striking weavers in 1844, with unemployed people in the Dresden area in southeast Germany who testified to their current experience of the drastic cuts to Germany's welfare state. Where the ironic deconstruction of Hauptmann's Weber in 1997 by the Berliner Volksbühne's Frank Castorf received unchallenged acclaim, Lösch's engagement with the contemporary inheritors of this century-old drama of exploitation and resistance earned a lawsuit from the playwright's heir and a judgment that forced him to excise Hauptmann's text from the performance until a higher court allowed him once again to include it. After comparable adaptations of Gogol's Government Inspector (2005), Büchner's Woyzeck (2007), and Weiss's Marat/Sade (2008), among others, Lösch's staging of Berlin Alexander-platz, which depicted in condensed form Alfred Döblin's 1929 story of ex-convict Franz Biberkopf, along with choral testimony from former convicts in present-day Berlin, still managed to vex the critics, if not the lawyers.

While dismissed by the reliably supercilious Theater Heute, Germany's most opinionated theatre magazine, for reducing Döblin's "complex . . . metropolitan novel" to a "charge sheet" against society for insufficient rehabilitation of ex-cons, Lösch, co-writers Beate Seidel and Maja Zade, and Bernd Freytag, who has directed lay choruses with Lösch since 2003, including Die Dresdner Weber (2004), succeeded in challenging their audiences with the juxtaposition of literary characters, embodied by professional actors, and local men and women bearing witness to the pitfalls of life after prison. All cast members, regardless of given names suggesting Eastern European, African, and Asian as well as German descent, spoke the proletarian Berlinerisch captured by Döblin and still spoken today, and the color portraits in the program showed them as they appeared on stage, in sweaters and jackets, leather and otherwise, without initially separating actors and ex-cons. Against this initial similarity, the professional performers certainly exhibited more precise acting technique and thus generated

Sebastian Nakajew (Franz Biberkopf) in Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Photo: Heiko Schäfer.)

Bank robbery ensemble in Berlin Alexanderplatz. (Photo: Heiko Schäfer.)

more focused affect as well as enactment. Nonetheless these differences emerged only gradually, as the actors portraying the characters from the novel distinguished themselves in the precise expression or withholding of emotion from the lay performers relating the stories, mostly in chorus, occasionally in solo voices, of members of the group of convicts rather than their individual selves.

On a stage covered with coins that the actors occasionally threw by the handfuls but that mostly slid and jangled underfoot (the set was by Carola Reuther), the performance began in the present with the chorus, divided into three groups, reciting lists of crimes and punishments and speaking of the difficulty of landing on their feet in a city rendered strange by ongoing transformation. The current condition of convicts and others marginalized in a city marked by speculation and a widening wealth gap thus framed the fictional account of Biberkopf, whose story began as he returned to his rundown neighborhood east of Alexanderplatz after serving time for killing his girlfriend. In a tightly wound performance by Sebastian Nakajew, Biberkopf angrily demanded "another life" and attempted to act "respectable" in the face of suspicion from his girlfriend's sister Minna (Eva Meckbach, who also played Biberkopf's new girlfriend, Mieze) and against the manipulation of Reinhold (David Ruland), who lured him back into a life of crime. Novel and testimony came together in a central account of a bank robbery. Here, the narrative of brief thrill and long let-down was represented by the performers donning matching T-shirts (as if for...