The flute player in the colorful juggler robe wants to punish the people of Hameln.

Punish for everything they and the authorities have done to him.

Once they had betrayed him and stole what he loved most, his Margaret.

In the cemetery, on her tombstone, the Pied Piper of Hamelin dramatically announces his revenge.

He wants to lure the rats out of their holes, but above all those who hide behind their office and their display of dignity and who played badly to the former “devil whistler”.

Luise Glaser-Lotz

Correspondent for the Rhein-Main-Zeitung for the Main-Kinzig district.

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With the "Pied Piper of Hameln", the Brothers Grimm Festival dared to present a legend for the first time.

Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were primarily concerned with recording the orally handed down folk property for posterity.

This included not only the fairy tales, but also the legends, of which she, but also her brother Ferdinand, collected and wrote down many.

The story of the Pied Piper, who in the thirteenth century was cheated by the Hamelin people for his wages for driving the rats out of the city and who therefore kidnapped the city's children, is perhaps the best-known German legend.

Unlike a fairy tale, a legend usually has a true core and often does not have a happy ending.

That is also the case with the story from Hameln.

The disappearance of around 130 children in 1284 is noted in the city's annals.

Researchers came to the conclusion that these were probably not children, but young people who turned their backs on the city together in order to make their fortune elsewhere, for example as settlers in the east.

Happy ending for the stage version

Such a substance is serious and heavy. Above all, the sad ending does not suit the festival, whose pieces always find a happy ending. So it is finally also with the staging of the Pied Piper legend, which premiered on Thursday. In the end everything is good. The Pied Piper finds his biological son in Hameln, almost like in a telenovela on television. He forgives the citizens and the leadership clan, especially since his main enemy, Count von Spiegelberg, disappears over the mountains. Most of all, the lost children are back.

This is the trick of author Stephan Lack and director François Camus: They simply turn the legend into a fairy tale in which the bad guys are punished, the hero of the story experiences an inner purification and in which there are also ghost figures like the ghost of Margaret that keeps the Pied Piper on the right track. Around this core are other characters that have been added to the plot, such as the nasty Count von Spiegelberg, his supposed son Albrecht, the mayor, his wife and daughter Marie, who leads the story as town clerk, and the master baker Anne, a lively person who but is burdened by the guilt that she once incurred. The difficulty of bringing a large crowd of children and a horde of rats onto the stage is easily avoided.The audience embodies the crowd and apart from a few cloth rats, the animal pests can only be guessed from the reaction of the mimes.

A convincing pied piper

With Dieter Gring and Helmut Potthoff, there are two character actors on the open-air stage of the amphitheater.

Above all, they give the staging depth and quality.

Potthoff depicts the tricky traveling quack abacus. This offers dubious medical applications as well as magic tricks up to and including the sawed-up maiden.

He calls it the "sale of hope", for the authorities in Hamel it is witchcraft.

Abacus is charged and - like the rats - is to be drowned in the Weser.

But the verdict is not carried out, because it is a fairy tale with the usual happy outcome.

The star of the play is the main actor Dieter Gring.

The long-time festival actor and former festival director portrays a pied piper, as the Grimms and the former Hamelers would have imagined: a charlatan in a brightly colored robe, with a cheeky hat and pointed shoes.

Sometimes humorous, sometimes vengeful, sometimes demonic, Gring addresses the audience as a pied piper.

The highlight is his “Rats concert at midnight” on the market square in Hamelin, when Gring enchants the imaginary rats with his magical game.

The next performances of “The Pied Piper of Hameln”

are this Sunday, July 11th, at 2 pm and at 6.30 pm.

Information and tickets at Frankfurt Ticket RheinMain, phone 069/13 40 400.