Too late to be early

The very first character you used to come across in the fifth grade textbook "Learning English" was called "Mr. Fog." Almost 30 years later, we encountered the Fog Man again in Eggs on Earth. As Mr. Fock/Mr. Fog, he is the great telephone phantom in Nicola Hümpel's production, to whom the seven characters repeatedly want to be put through - in vain, because in the youth cult of communication capitalism, "It's too late to start early." After the rather intimate situations that Nico and the Navigators explored in "Lucky days, stranger!", this time they have taken on the deforming world of work. The steps from the private to the social have served the troupe, founded at the Bauhaus in Dessau, well: In the past, the horrors lurking behind the word "picture theater" often came true in cramped, irrelevant prettiness. This time, it is not only the 1000 splendid possibilities offered by Oliver Proske's constructivist sewing box stage design that are spellbinding - this time, pictures also become scenes, play almost becomes dance. The scenes abstract different levels of adaptation: humiliation, submission, deformation, dependence, abuse. The objects with which the actors struggle are reified resistances that the relations of production oppose to happiness - as was once the case with Harold Lloyd, Keaton, or Chaplin. But as with these, art lifts the bleakness of the white-collar world into something higher: All static and heaviness disappears, the Sophiensaele seem to float.

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