It shines brightly.

It dominates the stage space.

And it moves.

On this evening of theatre, capitalism is represented by a monumental square grid made up of six transverse and six longitudinal bars.

It hovers over people like the sword of Damocles.

It suggests permeability, but its glass ceiling separates the classes from each other.

The nobility and the peasants live in different worlds until the system collapses and chaos reigns supreme.

"Peace to the cottages.

War on the palaces!” resounds a ten-strong, lumpenproletarian chorus, dressed in black, announcing the overthrow, accompanied by a thundering bass.

An indictment of the injustices in the state follows.

"What are the constitutions?

Nothing but empty straw.

What are our electoral laws?

Nothing but violations of civil rights."

Kevin Hanschke

volunteer.

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With this penetrating manifesto, based on the "Hessian Landbote", which the doctor and author Georg Büchner wrote in the summer of 1834 at the Gießen Badenburg as an indictment of the authorities and the abuses in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, the staging of "Leonce and Lena” at the Deutsches Theater in Berlin.

It is an explosive adaptation of the comedy – the genre that Büchner satirized with his text.

It is the political dimension of the 1836 satire on the idleness of the nobility that Rasche's staging focuses on.

For this he adds quotations from "Danton's Death" and "Lenz", from Büchner's personal correspondence and of the "Hessian Landbote".

He joins these scenes in montage technique on the continuously rotating stage, on which the nobility and the peasantry take turns speaking.

Both groups slowly and tenaciously force each word out of themselves;

with the nobility it comes from the boredom of doing nothing, with the subordinates from the exertions of servitude.

"Infinitely beautiful and infinitely spiritless"

Marcel Kohler plays Leonce as a hulking prince charming with an arrogant look of superiority;

his spiritual emptiness is also clearly visible from the outside.

Accordingly, he is looking for a woman who is "infinitely beautiful and infinitely spiritless," which he confidently trumpets.

Enno Trebs plays his faithful servant Valerio, who with his undershirt and muscular arms looks like a proletarian sculpture of socialist realism.

Julia Windischbauer plays Lena particularly well as a deeply sad girl with suicidal fantasies.

In a voice full of tears, she raises the question: "When the mind is tired, where should it rest?"

Rasche plays the scenes from Büchner's comedy in the second part of the play.

Prince Leonce and Princess Lena are said to be forced upon each other without knowing each other;

they flee, meet on the run and fall in love.

They pretend to be vending machines and throw a wedding.

"Nothing but art and mechanism, nothing but cardboard covers and clock springs," as the play says.