Two plays - they are about kings.

Her theme: Nothing stays the same, there is no way out.

"Everything goes as it should" - that's what Margarete says in "The King Dies" by Eugène Ionesco, and here it is time that forces the aged ruler to abdicate.

In Friedrich Schiller's "Don Carlos", on the other hand, it is - "Give freedom of thought" - the desire for independence of an oppressed people that afflicts the royal despot.

Both thrones are persistently shaken – until they fall.

Schiller's Don Carlos takes place in an echo chamber of power at the Ernst Deutsch Theater in Hamburg.

All sorts of microphones hang from the ceiling or are positioned between the chairs spread out in a wide semicircle on the bare stage, on which the actors sit as if in a recording studio.

A lot of sound and reverberation and alienated atmosphere mixes with their voices.

The threads or cables of this total eavesdropping attack come together in the hands of Hannes Hellmann as the dashing King Philip II of Spain.

He has arranged his thinning hair just as accurately as his authority.

Sebastian Egger already contradicts this habit from the outside as his only son Carlos, a soft lanky with oversized pants and intellectual baby fat, appealingly tearful and impulsively confused.

Inspired by the Marquis of Posa, his liberal, enlightened friend, he does whatever rushes through his head.

In Katrin Kersten's stage design, Carlos initially builds a shelter out of potted plants and seating furniture in which to hide, but it's impossible to completely disappear.

How do politics and love go together?

Mona Kraushaar positions all figures against each other at eye and ear level.

The director and her well-balanced ensemble have - how rare that has become!

– empathetic patience with the text and its verses, with the characters and their volts.

After an excerpt from Giuseppe Verdi's opera "Don Carlos", new mountains of sound by Albrecht Ziepert tower over the musical level, emphasizing the isolation character of this surveillance state like rhythmically bursting bubble wrap.

How do politics and love go together?

The men talk each other's necks and necks, the two women, who are also allowed to join in, are not inferior to them.

Karla Sengteller's Eboli is a fun-loving princess who is passionately in love with Carlos.

She takes revenge when he rejects her because he secretly loves Elizabeth of Valois, although his father stole her from him and made her Queen of Spain.

When Philipp deeply humiliates Elisabeth out of jealousy, Anne Rohde runs in circles like a wounded bird in a wine-red velvet dress, utters high-pitched cries of lamentation and falls to the ground in horror, which disturbs the court society but will not change anything in the circumstances.

Mona Kraushaar's production captivates

Although a bit too condensed at the end, Mona Kraushaar's production captivates and fascinates with its cool purism and trust in Schiller's "dramatic poem".

She lets more words speak than deeds, which is not a bad choice, especially in these times, when Enzo Brumm, for example, as a utopia-drunk Posa, calls out to his King Philip: "You want to plant for eternity / And sow death?"

Even the monarch in Eugène Ionesco's The King Dies is reminded of Philip II by his personal physician, who demands that he – like him – should die with dignity.

But the old gentleman doesn't even think about it.

He would rather live, celebrate, enjoy his power.

He consistently denies that he is broke and ill, that his empire has been reduced by erosion and secret border shifts and that hardly anyone now lives in it.

Is he an idiosyncratic daydreamer or already advanced in dementia?

In this classic of the theater of the absurd, which premiered in Paris in 1962, the possibilities of interpretation remain open.

The grotesque hubris by Dieter Hallervorden

Director Philip Tiedemann, who staged the play in Berlin's Schlosspark Theater, which is located a little south-west of the capital and was once a branch of the Schiller Theater, which closed in 1993, is also wary of clear answers.

His artistic director has been Dieter Hallervorden since 2008, and Tiedemann has conjured up "The King Dies" as a happy and comfortable death comedy for the almost eighty-seven-year-old comedian body with a skillful director's hand.

In blue patterned silk pajamas under the crimson king's cloak, sometimes with a mischievous grin in cabaret, sometimes stubborn as a grim child, he is the shy and bold regent who is only interested in one thing in the whole world: himself.

Dieter Hallervorden, long since emancipated from Didi skits like “Palim, Palim”, has risen through film and theater to become a veritable folk actor.

As soon as he enters the stage between fabric walls around a worn throne (equipment: Alexander Martynov), he is greeted with applause from the audience, but he does not rest on this wave of affection.

As a tried-and-tested joker, he gives the rather static performance with its explanatory, impassive concert pitch the nimble tripping legs, the flippant jokes, the grotesque hubris: a joke and a crown.

The king cried and frightened the people in "Don Carlos".

He laughed at Ionesco - and made her happy.

The open-minded historian Schiller would certainly have called this progress.