At the beginning of the 1980s, when Michael Frayn's "The Naked Madness" was published, "Wetten dass..?" was the highlight of the evening entertainment, the humor hadn't yet been trained by Harald Schmidt, and on Twitter you couldn't post real-time comments every minute read about current events, curated by the algorithms according to the individually desired bitingness and complexity.

There you found mistaken identity comedies with slipping pants, falling down stairs, and all sorts of misunderstandings, in short: slapstick as the main attraction on the stage was obviously funny.

The tax office rings twice

The anxious question at this theater evening in Hanover was whether the somewhat worn-out harmlessness of such slapstick humor could still work today.

And you had to give a different answer before and after the break.

"The Naked Madness" is theater about theatre.

An ensemble plays the fictional piece "When the tax office rings twice", which is shown in three versions, at the dress rehearsal and in two other performances.

It is set in the supposedly vacant house of a tax-evading couple, in which that couple, the housekeeper, a real estate agent with his mistress and a burglar meet.

Or not at first, because the protagonists walk past each other for quite a while, miss each other with every change of room and only slowly suspect that something is wrong.

At the same time, "Naked Wahnsinn" is about the ensemble that plays this piece, or better: tries to play it.

Text dropouts or missed assignments undermine the production or the personal relationships of the actors.

However, this second level rarely goes beyond slapstick;

And that's how it is with the director played by Nikolay Gemel, whose wonderfully experienced annoyance is expressed in a regular long drawn-out "Okay" and should mean: "And next?"

Flashy costumes

The stage is an emphatically construction site-like wooden construction that glares at the spectators in atomic yellow.

Numerous doors let the actors, dressed in yellow, neon-orange or otherwise flashy costumes, enter and leave the stage at insane speed.

While the always imaginative costumes of the actually tried and tested trio of director Anne Lenk, costume designer Sibylle Wallum and set designer Judith Oswald acted as a relaxing contrast in their classic productions, they only seem shrill here.

In terms of colour, it is sometimes reminiscent of the contents of a chewing gum machine, and dramaturgically it is as sweet and tough as what you got out of there for ten pfennigs.

Natural frustration

Nothing is as unfunny as the unconditional will to comedy.

The grotesque costumes with high plastic foreheads and a few too many hi-low variations make it stand out all too clearly.

It also doesn't help that it remains unclear whether the exalted acting in the first act is supposed to increase the supposedly comical or distance itself from it through overemphasis.

The second act works a little better, in which we now look behind the stage and you have to admire the precision with which the events before and behind are not only coordinated in time, but also comment on each other.

And then, after the break, when you no longer believed in it, everything suddenly works: the actors appear for the third time, now lovingly and damaged made up and apparently just as suffering from the fictional play as you were in the first act the evening before the break was all too expected, the previously built expectations are now all the more subversive.

The actors' entries and dialogues are shifted almost fugally, the chaos no longer seems merely asserted, the affected acting of the first act has given way to the actors' natural unnervingness,

This successful third act is also due to Hajo Tuschy, who plays the stage manager of the ensemble and is supposed to bridge the time until the actors, who are arguing loudly behind the scenes, make it onto the stage.

At first he stumbles from one slip of the tongue to the next, but then becomes increasingly comfortable in front of the audience and eventually breaks out of the play, seamlessly addressing the actual audience in a speech filled with furious defiance and contemporary stand-up comedy he breaks with the previous extravagance of the evening and invokes the continuation of the theater.

"I will survive", he sings and one is glad to be able to agree with him when looking through the rows of the sold-out theatre.