She can even find humor in Shakespeare's sonnets, which are drunk with love and sorrow. Nicola Hümpel - she is the Nico of the Navigators - confronts the poetry, written before 1609 and compressed to the extreme, among other things with a man from today who, as a high school graduate, had failed miserably in his sonnet interpretation: "Nebulously incomprehensible," he had written at the time. Now he is an environmentalist. The more he understands the sonnets, the more it goes downhill with the mixed forest, up to erosion, abrasion of cliffs. Shakespeare was quite a woodsman back then, he thinks. Then he continues talking to Sebastian Herzfeld's soft live music, which adds its sound to the sound of the words. This is one of the images with which the director Nicola Hümpel nestles up to or opposes the highly artificial art products of the master who once wrote the 154 sonnets. She brings ten of them parable-like onto the scene of the Theater Aufbau Kreuzberg, which is encompassed by a background arch. Adrian Gillott, a Navigator veteran, enters shyly. And says the poet drank and cried a lot while writing. He puts on a wig and slips into his part. He has an easy time with the English originals, but they are difficult to understand for today's listeners. So his fellow actors Nils Dreschke and Sebastian Fortak have the role of playfully providing the translations. About 300 translators have tried their hand at the linguistically dense laments about the loss of beauty, youth, love partners. They all sound different - but what does the lyricist really mean with his words? This, too, is the subject of the 75-minute evening. It is certain that 126 of the sonnets are addressed to a young man, real person or poetic fiction. Hümpel therefore has her men act with tutus over their suit trousers. Although this ballerina prop was invented much later, it represents the androgyny of the situation and at the same time the tradition of Elizabethan theater to have female roles played by young men. While "Shakespeare" Gillot goes into a feverish rage about love and his listener shapes the tutu into the fashionable collar of the time, the poet defends himself, saying that there are just too few words in the German language for accurate translations. His lament about aging and the appeal to reproduce oneself in the child is "spoken" by the doll of an old man. After it first dies, then comes back to life, this doll intrusively approaches a woman, the singer Julla von Landsberg. In another scene it becomes the grotesque upper part of a human lower part: Shakespeare screams into its deafened ear his lament for a lost love. Then the director becomes more explicit and places a man at the side of the wailing man, who kisses his hand and sinks down against him as he breathes the titular sonnet 90: "Hate me when thou wilt..." - hate me when thou wilt, but leave me not. But Hümpel would not be the subtle director if she did not break the pathos of loss ironically. A punch in the genitals bends the one who claims that no greater pain than that loss can hit him. When Shakespeare increasingly writes himself in pain, sees himself in sonnet 90 as a slave of the beloved, he is built into a paket piece, the singer accompanies his suffering with vocalizations. He frees himself from the dungeon, but once he has acquired a taste for it, he can hardly be stopped. Like a rock star, musically rhythmic, he sounds lyricism into a microphone next to the rubble, even when the music falls silent, the sound is turned off, the lights go out. Just Shakepeare forever. Whether Shakespeare was as vain as suggested here belongs to the realm of artistic freedom. Hümpel uses this freedom for a very personal excursion into the world of the poet, tries to get behind his motives and to bring what is meant to be read to the theater stage. Racy, marionette-like mechanical movements illustrate the often distant diction of the poems in this stimulating cooperation with the Puppentheater Halle.

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