"Seven deadly sins": singer Peaches in the crossover spectacle

Hand on heart: who can list the seven deadly sins? Those who are already struggling with the Ten Commandments will certainly have difficulty in naming the offenses that, in the opinion of the Catholic Church, are particularly bad and that God does not like. It is likely to commit - deliberately or negligently - these misdeeds more often than you think.

Throw the first stone, which believes itself free from arrogance, avarice, voluptuousness, anger, gluttony, envy and greed. All the qualities that life undercuts so much, if you're not starving in a hermetically sealed monastery cell.

No Catholics - the Lord knows! - were Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, and yet, in the thirties, they took all the evil transgressions catalog to make a "ballet with song" in collaboration with choreographer George Balanchine. They wanted to show that it is these overly humane passivities that are driving the unstoppable rise of murderous capitalism.

God would have fled before this evening

On the way to the intimate family life in the home, the zwiegespaltenen Anna, who often wants the good and the one to get the evil, faces the whole wickedness of the world. She becomes entangled in misconduct, becomes a victim of her own weaknesses. Brecht's rhyming text between sacral pathos and brutal emergency inventory, the somewhat confused fragmentary plot and Weill's tart, clear, ominous tones make this a rather difficult feat of downright rebelliousness.

The director Anna-Sophie Mahler did not want to leave it that dusty when she created a crossover evening with pomp and pop in the Stuttgarter Schauspiel, which God, if he had happened to be in the world and in the theater, would surely have left fleeing - like some subscribers.

Because Mahler is not satisfied with the classic template (unfortunately somewhat sparse and helpless) to illustrate. She puts on the seven even a monstrous sin on it, namely, the Canadian performance artist and electro-clash singer Peaches brings in the water. She is known for not mincing words and shame.

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This idea causes the staging to break up into two fairly unequal halves. Settled in a boxing ring and accompanied by the still very docile, but vocally astonishing Weill-capable Peaches (and the Stuttgart State Orchestra under Stefan Schreiber), come in the first original part of the two Anna (the actress Josephine Köhler and the dancer Louis Stiens) of a Misstep in the other.

They box in Sportdress through the adversities of the world, fiercely marking their anger and greediness, clinging enviously, gagging each other voluptuously, while a chorus of four massive baritones does not comment on the foreseeable decline without malice.

The second part is aimed at the dissatisfied women

That life is a constant struggle, in which one often gets one on the nose: Plumper could not have shown it to Mahler. The scenes have a redundant effect. The meager moral: He wins the reward that triumphs over himself.

In order to get the curve to the present and the future, something radically has to happen. Josephine Köhler initiates the second part of the evening as a "Proletin of Femininity" with a beautiful bilious, angry monologue, she quotes from the "King Kong Theory" by the successful French author Virginie Despentes - and now it is known that the first 40 minutes are only bourgeois -harmeless art-skirmishes were taunting.

Köhler addresses himself in the words of Despentes with admiration and solidarity to "the ugly, badly-fussed and dissatisfied women", who do not fit in any drawer. And Peaches, who gleams brightly lit from the stage sky like an avenging angel, then finally picks up the thread that has been so twisted up to make it absolutely clear that there are actually no sins.

And if something goes wrong, only the patriarchal structures are to blame anyway: the true devil is white, male and heterosexual.

As feminist as vulgar are the lyrics of, of course, transgender Canadian Peaches, who in the course of her show (with many well-known hits, because of which a majority of the audience seems to have even come) defoliated in a coquettish burlesque way and between plush pussies and dances around a giant inflatable penis as a nasty temptation.

Let Brecht and Weill's vague worldview be tilted

Peaches and Mahler want to counteract Brecht and Weill here, want to lull their vague view of the world and lead their criticism to absurdity, by assiduously claiming that sexual lawlessness is already half the battle on the path to the liberation of the individual.

The singer lasciviously dislocates herself and gets caught up in her oh-so-provocative yet reliably circumscribed taboo crossing. To the seven deadly sins, of course, she has with their laboriously trimmed on the theme best of program and their rather simple porno poetry (usually rhymes only "angry" on "cunt") not much to contribute more than the call: "Put your dick in the air ". What used to be the angry clenched fist is now just a banal erection: Rudelbums instead of class struggle.

In the end Anna-Sophie Mahler tries to ground the whole disparate company, which despite a (world) star, is not really successful. To the sounds of Charles Ives' "The unanswered question" Melinda Witham of the State Ballet dances a choreography with wounded, damaged gentleness: dissonances lie over the harmonies, a physical rebellion and failure.

How much simpler and more irritating than Brecht's raised finger and Peaches's sagging vagina monologues! The most beautiful, saddest and most honest picture of the evening: What remains, it describes the woken in their mute loneliness Witham, is alone the yearning for the right, self-determined life.

"The Seven Deadly Sins", Schauspiel Stuttgart, next performances on the 7th, 12th, 17th and 25th of February, www.schauspiel-stuttgart.de