That’s me!

They can't decide, not for each other and not for what they want to do with the rest of their lives. The lonely city dwellers who populate the stage in "Kain, Wenn & Aber," the new production by Nico & the Navigators in Berlin's Sophiensaele, seem like chance visitors in their own lives, late, somewhat ironic relatives of the hurried and melancholy ones from Handke's "Stunde, da wir nichts voneinander wussten. They seem very lost on the stage, which is bordered by walls in a semicircle: indecisive and uninhibited, who, even if they sometimes roll over each other for moments or circle each other coquettishly, pining for each other or kicking each other's butts energetically ("Have a vision!"), seem slightly autistic. One gentleman in a suit pushes himself along a wall with his head down, another utters curses ("Fuck psychology! Fuck philosophy!") as he tumbles off a bench again and again: a human perpetual motion machine of hopeless excitement. The Navigators, the most charming group of Berlin's independent scene, perform about a hundred such mini-dramas in just under two hours, mostly wordless and as laconic as they are funny. The ego and the world - both seem to be lost to these existential clowns. "That's me, that's all just there, I can't do anything about it and I can't do anything against it." Nicola Hümpel, director of the Navigators, has staged an evening that prances beautifully and somewhat aimlessly through the perplexities.

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