Facets of a holiday idyll

Christmas can come: "The Family Council" of the ensemble "Nico and the Navigators" meets at the FFT Juta The music gives it away: it's Christmas, and at no other time of the year does the family intrude so much into our consciousness and allow subliminal conflicts to emerge. Even the writer Heimito von Doderer knew that "whoever enters the family will perish in it". Family, a concept as complex as a therapy session. Each member has tacitly assumed his or her role in it, putting on a good face so as not to endanger the superficial holiday harmony, even though violence and aggression are seething inside, in danger of suddenly erupting. The ensemble "Nico and the Navigators" around director Nicola Hümpel approaches with their new play "The Family Council" these for outsiders mostly strange rules of the dear relatives. The seven actors translate the diversity of human behavioral rituals, the often rationally unjustifiable processes in everyday family life, into their specific theatrical language. In the process, words have become almost superfluous. The production lives from a visual language that allows the audience to associate freely and sets no limits to their imagination. In the process, things are robbed of their ordinary meaning. A coat hanger can also be used for writing and the shower becomes a closet. This changeability is supported by Oliver Proske's red stage. Flap open, flap closed: sometimes a door, then a garage roof, finally a house. The stage design offers many possibilities for retreat and hiding - just like the family. They also seem to like to exchange their roles, so that one wonders "Who is actuallyfather, mother, brother or sister now?" The stage family acts in slow-motion dreaminess, but also in slapstick comedy. Their moods are musically underscored, so that a unity of movement, sound, language and space images develops. The production appears poetic and surreal. Words hardly play a role, and so even phrases such as "He was too thin to take responsibility" or "The peace and quiet in the herb garden was better than any old-age provision" evade any context of meaning. There is a speechless sense of well-being, sometimes even at family gatherings.

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