When the fossil fuel age comes to an end, will gas stations be the same as they are today?

Local suppliers that are open day and night all year round, gasoline, charging station, cigarettes, coffee, snacks, baked goods, groceries, magazines, washroom, toilets.

Or will the gas station soon be a relic from the good old days?

That should have been one of the reasons why the Australian playwright and director Simon Stone set his new play "Our Time" there.

Hannes Hintermeier

Feuilleton correspondent for Bavaria and Austria.

  • Follow I follow

Blanca Añón built the perfect glass case for him in the Munich Residenztheater. Familiar down to the last nook and cranny, “E-tanken” contains a supermarket, a parcel pick-up station, and a standing café. Two monitors show the audience what is happening from the point of view of surveillance cameras, on top of that this point of contact for lost souls turns on its own axis, the ugly back with garbage cans and toilets also comes into play, not only the front side with cut flowers, bar table and cash register. The camera bluntly zooms in on the colorful world of goods and transmits close-up shots of bags of chips and ice cream cups, the images are intended to be read as an ironic break from the action on the stage. Important questions of faith are decided at the refrigerator - do you drink Augustiner or Tegernsee? In any case, almost all customers drink way too much,and people smoke incessantly. Also something that was less popular at gas stations in the good old days.

The pimp and his escort lady

Simon Stone started the “theatrical analysis of our present” “freely based on Ödön von Horváth's motifs”, as far as the program sheet goes: Fifteen people, most of them somewhere between twenty and forty, children of our time, are looking for something to hold onto in life and are ready for it to sell yourself.

The play follows these rise and fall stories from the last day of August 2015 to early autumn 2021. So from Chancellor Merkel's “We can do it!” Dictum to the long-covid feeling these days.

All debates of the past years, racism, MeToo, white old men, colonialism, refugee wave, health dictatorship, Afghanistan are included.

In Stones gas station people of different origins, skin color and social status meet, only that here they relate to one another or are already standing. The Munich Strizzi Konrad (Simon Zagermann), who runs the gas station, cannot keep his eyes and soon his hands off the new temporary worker Ulli (Antonia Münchow). Always a quick pick-up line on his lips, he has so much heart to take on the illegal Kurd Hawal (Delschad Numan Khorschid). He is less gracious towards the confused prophet Massimo (Nicola Mastroberardino), who is bound to this place by fate - the death of his daughter in the car wash next door. The criminal Stanislaw (Oliver Stokowski) meets the escort lady Julia (Liliane Amuat) as a pimp to collect his commission.