When there is a rocket on the stage in a theatre, you know that the characters are aiming high.

Or that they come from very far away.

In "Love, simply extraterrestrial", the new play by René Pollesch, whose premiere he himself staged at the Deutsches Theater Berlin, both potential storylines definitely overlap in this very aircraft: Humans and aliens meet and don't know what's happening to them.

In Barbara Steiner's stage design, the rocket is a rickety wooden tower with window openings, jagged flashes of light on the outside and a spiral staircase on the inside.

In the beginning, Sophie Rois as High Commander Nina and Trystan Pütter as Dr.

Steve Albright high up on a platform, smoking and contemplating how this moment might affect others.

"Everything points to the fact that we had sex," she says, but he contradicts: "We just come up a tower and smoke a cigarette."

First laugh: Was that funny?

First laughs in the audience at the funny scene and at their own judgement.

Because of course both interpretations are plausible, and of course we follow the protagonists in one direction and the other.

The play thus unfolds as a game with the possibilities of reading the world.

It is theater in the best sense of the word, because it tirelessly and artfully raises the question of what is being and what is appearance.

Normally, as René Pollesch shows in an amusing and intelligent way, people are neither able nor willing to look at reality without soft focus.

That's why facts don't make you happy, fiction does.

Fantasy serves as a "phantasmatic screen" to soften the view of the facts, as Slavoj Žižek, quoted by Pollesch, put it.

In order to protect their planet, the two need information about the composition of a radar beam with which the astro researcher Albright threatens to penetrate its protective cover.

Or something like that.

In any case, the women are poorly prepared for their espionage mission, all they have with them is a pocket-sized travel guide.

However, Ms. Knoop repeatedly advises her colleague not to invite Albright out for a cup of coffee because that would mean she wants to sleep with him.

Regardless, it still does it immediately.

He replies that he doesn't like coffee at all and Nina says she doesn't have any anyway.

When he wants to kiss her anyway, a screen descends onto which various kissing scenes from films and the animal kingdom are projected.

Nina now imitates her brightly, since as an alien she knows neither kisses nor sex, whereupon he finally falls in love with her.

It's getting bolder and wittier, fueled by light-hearted "Hey Ho Let's Go"-esque pop songs.

The three from the Talkstelle

The three of the talk station, excited by theory, euphorically screw the absurdities higher, further, more beautiful.

Sometimes Nina speaks directly to "the beings in the second rank" who cannot see everything, they "are apparently bombarded by their superego with impossible demands for pleasure, and the superego then gleefully watches their failure".

Later, Albright fetches cream cakes and enjoys them with her, which is admittedly not very mannerly.

Kotbong Yang wipes the stairs as a cleaning lady and sometimes runs around as if they were sneakers, enthusiastically in high heels, which do not exist at home in her distant galaxy.

Whether on Ohnsorg-Theater-Platt or in science fiction gibberish, the strangers find a taste for the earth, the earth man is also impressed, but without understanding the connections.

When he finally has sex with Nina, a small film is shown in which she is expectantly waiting for him on the pillows while he satirizes all the clichés of the guy construction worker with the heavy hammer.

She is satisfied, after all she was only able to find out about human sexuality quickly with a few cheap porn videos.

In between there is singing and dancing, the revolving stage rotates, concepts flourish, the chaos erupts.

During collective debates about lies and deceit, feelings and instincts, an umbrella is even put up, perhaps against the heat, perhaps against the unreasonable demands of reality,

perhaps to filter “the traumatic out of the sexual act” or perhaps against the “furies of disappearance”, as Hans Magnus Enzensberger once paraphrased Hegel.

"We have art so that we don't perish from the truth," says Nietzsche.

René Pollesch proves once again to be a practical master of applied theories, who can conjure up thrillingly clever theater from everything that has heart and brain.

Smartly dressed by Tabea Braun and dazzlingly attuned by the esprit of the text, Kotbong Yang in a chic business suit, Trystan Pütter mostly in a colorful shorts holiday look and Sophie Rois in red sequins and in her artistic extra class make the thought balloons fly and the emotional codes to freak out.

This witty and witty trio infernal wants to take us on a grandiose excursion into outer space - and still lets us laugh in the theater chair.

And clap with happiness.