As all the blood of the class shed, all family conflicts are unresolved and the bodies are painterly distributed in the moonlit stage scenery, the great actress Thelma Buabeng speaks a text by Carolin Emcke on a video screen.

"Sometimes I would prefer violence to be unclothed, naked, ruthless, without these stories being spent as necessary, as right, as humanitarian, as a just punishment," she says, "without these false etiquette asserting that contempt is patriotic or resistant ".

Was Friedrich Schiller a big-mouthed transfigurator? The Kölner Schauspiel has shown Schiller's play "Die Räuber" on Friday evening, a German classic. The play tells a story about various attempts to justify violence.

Two different brothers of a father

Each of the two sons of Count Maximilian von Moor, who plays actor Bruno Cathomas in Cologne in a dirty white nightgown, feels in himself reason for anger and murder and manslaughter.

Franz, the younger son, was denied paternal love, mocked for his inferior intelligence and cursed for his lack of charm as "cold" and "wooden".

Karl, who from childhood on had manipulated the father with excessive affection, sensitive-sensitive first-born, has fled from coddling at home into a student lottery in far-off Leipzig; because his father, abruptly disturbed by his brother, appears to have suddenly rejected him, he decides to lead the criminal existence of a robber.

Women playing men

In the Cologne show, the two enemy brothers are played by two women. The actress Sophia Burtscher is "Franz, the canaille" (as it is called in the play), wears blonde curls around her head and a violet-colored long silk dress on the narrow, high-cut body.

The actress Lola Klamroth trudges as Karl Moor also big and proud in a green robe on stage and later wears beige pants to black boots.

Both actresses get along wonderfully with a roar of anger and sword swinging. The object of their desire is called Amalia and is carved by the outwardly compact actor Jonas Grundner-Culemann as a whimpering pile of misery. The consequent and only sometimes strange distortion of gender roles is the principle of this theater evening.

Three and a half hours for a classic

The director Ersan Mondtag leaves Schiller's language largely untouched, his performers and performers three and a half hours faithfully record the text of the play, which premiered more than 230 years ago - that's one of the surprises of this theater evening, which by no means wants to be a classicist.

The director has moved Schiller's drama from the epoch of the German Sturm und Drang into a black and romantic world of hauntings and ghosts. The back wall of the stage, designed by Mondtag himself, shows a full moon over dark fir trees, on the left is the scary castle of Count Moor with grotesque ancestral portraits and glowing wall lights, in the middle of the stage there is a water hole that looks like a horse-drawn drink.

Shortly after the beginning, the men and women of Karl Moors robbers gang throw themselves into a stream of initiation in white underwear in the shallow waters and remain there as rigidly as if they were in a mass grave.

Surrealistic forest balance mood

It's a downright surrealistic forest-rest mood that Moon Day conjures up here. The call of a little owl and slightly dissonant string music can be heard in the semi-darkness, mist billowing, four black-clad deathwomen adorned with feather hats ghosting through the woods and repeatedly agree with Schiller's robber song:

"Stealing, killing, whoring, bellowing, means to us time divide, tomorrow we hang on the gallows, so let's be funny today."

Schiller's play is famous and a bit infamous as an alleged drama of freedom. In Cologne, one wants to prove that in reality it is less about the conflict between lawfulness and rioting than about revenge and youthful violence.

The program reads that the drama "worsens the demands of the Enlightenment and eventually leads to despotism, materialism and nihilism". On stage, this is an absolutely amazing, but also horrendously tedious atmosphere arrangement. Lunchtime actors and actors speak Schiller's words either in a well-rehearsed video in the autumn forest of the Elbe Sandstone Mountains and live in Grusicalsetting.

Atmosphere is everything, the action sound and smoke

And as eager as they do their work, their director places so little value on plausibility and psychological accuracy. Whether Amalia's suffering or the fight in the robber camp, everything is handled in the same tone here - it was dark, the murder went fast; Atmosphere is everything, the action sound and smoke.

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4 pictures

"The robbers" in Cologne: Violence was horrible even as a Sturm-und-Drang-child

In the dim light of this "robber" performance, a statue of the old bog that looks like the caricature of a Lenin monument and wears a gallows rope around its neck for a long time stands in the sky until it finally falls.

Why exactly the dead Count Moor himself brings the statue to fall, remains thoroughly incomprehensible - like much of this theatrical evening packed with great ideas, great pictures and beautiful words.

It is not a radical reinterpretation of a canonical text, not a resolute Schiller denial that succeeds Ersan Mondtag with the Cologne "robber" assault, but a rather diffuse plea to reconcile the angry masses and the sexes.

Carolin Emcke formulates in her epilogue, which is declared a "monologue on freedom", "with all corporeality, all spirit, all jokes, all diversity, and a we that remains permeable and changeable . " Words that really make it clear: a little more joke and humor would not have hurt this performance.

"The robbers" . Schauspiel Cologne, next performances on the 17th, 24th and 27th of March