What's the matter with our theaters that they deliver package inserts with productions and warn of risks and side effects, as if there were no one more terrible than Shakespeare's Richard III.

or Dürrenmatt's Claire Zachanassian?

No nice people, of course, but isn't the evil goings-on part of the core literary business?

Apparently not, which is why the website of the Deutsches Theater Berlin now has the following information about Albert Camus' "Caligula": "This production contains explicit depictions of physical and sexualized violence, which can have a stressful or retraumatizing effect."

Between us: The bit of blood and gagging and discreet mating is no particular surprise in the German-language theater of 2022.

A warning of a completely different kind would have been more appropriate: "This production explicitly contains no art and does not know exactly why it is being shown at all, which may disturb you, for which we would like to apologize in advance, because we don't know any better. "

A tragedy of knowledge

Nevertheless, the question cannot be suppressed: What actually made the director Lilja Rupprecht to deal with the notorious Roman emperor, who does not want to bow to reality and its laws and therefore flees into a dream world of chaos and tyranny - and his people involved?

In any case, Rupprecht's production in the Kammerspiele does not answer the question.

We look into a stage-wide tub with charred snippets and a few men who wear dark suits at the beginning, then red stockings with black high heels and at the end playful little vinyl dresses and no pants.

Elias Arens does a similar thing as Caligula after he first shone in a sequined suit.

One knocks Camus' text around the ears or says it obediently.

People like to stand around.

The story is only hinted at by the stage design by Christina Schmitt, elaborate camera technology and unusual props such as a meter-high ball that rolls in at a leisurely pace.

The performance is not a material battle, but it would like to be one.

In terms of content, however, little is happening.

Nothing is known about Caligula and his astonishing development.

Even his famous sentence "People die and they are not happy" has no dramaturgical effect.

Camus' drama, which premiered in Paris in 1945, reflects the philosophy of the absurd, although Camus later did not like hearing that, preferring to speak of a "tragedy of knowledge".

It makes no difference here.

Whether it's the cost of logic or the cost of freedom, the whip "for work-shyness" or "the sickness of the soul," fate, asceticism, or red-lacquered toenails—everything is declaimed in a very lengthy and very interchangeable manner.

In contrast, even Natali Seelig as Caligula's lover Caesonia or Manuel Harder as his antipode Cherea are defenseless.

In between runs Helicon, Caligula's most faithful servant, cast with Christian Behrend, Juliana Götze, Rebecca Sickmüller and Jonas Sippel from the Berlin inclusive theater RambaZamba.

The actors with Down's syndrome as the compliant bailiffs of the crazy power sadists?

That works neither artistically nor dramaturgically.

Which would describe the evening as a whole.

Nobody warned us about that.

Unfortunately.