The whole truth about lies
The musical theatre ensemble Nico and the Navigators performed at the Rococo Theatre at the end of the Schwetzingen Festival
A certain amount of confusion must have arisen in large parts of the audience right at the beginning when the Christian creed was recited unabridged. This was then captured in the last spoken text of ‘The whole Truth about Lies’, a kind of revue presented by the Berlin music theatre ensemble Nico and the Navigators at the end of this year's Schwetzingen SWR Festival in the Rococo Theatre, written by the ensemble itself: ‘I believe in lies / The almighty / The driving force of people on earth / And in progress / Their natural companion, our star. / Conceived through insatiable greed, / Born in the bloody battles, / Suffered under the constraints of truth, / Judged but never died, / Drawn down into the realm of good / Risen again and again from the good / Ascended into the future. / He sits at the right hand of the lie / Of the almighty mother; / And there he will remain / Transforming the living into the dead. / I believe in false promises / The unstoppable growth / Fellowship of the deceptive / Falsification of the truth / Slander of the good and eternal evil / Amen.’
This field of tension gave rise to a two-hour kaleidoscope of around twenty pieces of music from Handel to Chopin, Jacques Offenbach, Shostakovich, Ligeti and John Lennon, set for violin, trumpet, piano, electric guitar and percussion, in some cases enhanced by synthesiser and electronically alienated. This was accompanied by texts that take a rather pessimistic view of human behaviour and spectacular ballet interludes.
The stage design was based on an invention by John Henry Pepper from 1862, called ‘Pepper's Ghost’, in which a skilfully positioned, semi-transparent mirror makes activities performed while lying on the floor appear to float freely in space through reflection, while also allowing interaction with people positioned behind the mirror. This old illusion technique was given a contemporary twist with alienating video projections, whereby almost everything that took place on stage could also be seen as a video image.
The evening was characterised by the high artistic achievements, emotional resilience and unbridled enthusiasm of the entire ensemble, with which the concept of the ensemble director Nicola Hümpel, characterised by exuberant scenic imagination, was brought to the stage.
You could simply enjoy it, but of course it was also intended to stimulate thought and reflection, but it also gave rise to contradiction. For example, it is doubtful that thinking automatically leads to lying and that one should therefore withdraw to the senses. It should also be noted that the series ‘progress - lies - evil’ evoked in the creed quoted implies the highly questionable opposite ‘regression - truth - good’.
Of course, you can also ask about the relationship between lies and illusion or truth and reality, but then you simply have to call the end of the programme kitsch: To John Lennon's ‘Gimme some Truth’, the Berlin ensemble snuggled together under a large blanket and wrote the word ‘Love’ in capital letters across the scene.
Such nostalgic recourse to the romance of flower power and the legendary ‘bed-in’ of honeymooners John Lennon and Yoko Ono in an Amsterdam hotel in 1969 will certainly not solve the real problems of this world. It would have significantly increased the evening's impact if it had closed with the confession ‘I believe in lies...’. Did Nico and the Navigators lack the courage to do so?
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