Can you still hear all the shocking news about climate change, overpopulation and undersupply?
Can you still bear them?
But then Lina Beckmann comes into the dark hall of the Hamburg theater in a black jumper with black trousers and describes the current world situation so seriously and resolutely that all the problems that one would rather have left outside are there again: "We couldn't see that what was wrong.
So we closed our eyes.
So that we couldn't see that something was wrong.” And as she thinks and speaks all this with all the truthfulness of her fine art, while looking the audience in the face, the well-known facts suddenly really get under your skin, as if they were new .
The Australian author Finegan Kruckemeyer, born in 1981, has now added a prologue to the German-language premiere of his play “The Long Sleep”, which premiered in Adelaide in 2021.
Lina Beckmann presents it as a speech to the world, which here is no bigger than any of us.
That's what makes him so believable.
After that, the curtain rises on six blocks of light sticks, rigged with a few props to represent a café in Australia, a kitchen in Colombia, a television studio in Los Angeles, a house in Nigeria and another in Tajikistan, and a government plane above the clouds are.
The director Philipp Stölzl, together with Franziska Harm, elegantly found an optical correspondence to the dramatic modules of the play in the stage design.
Sleep to save the planet?
"The Long Sleep" is an original thought experiment about how the destruction of the environment could be stopped: With the help of a special gas, all people will be put into a kind of hibernation for a year in 2030 to allow nature to recover - as was the case during the corona lockdowns, when global CO2 values fell drastically.
But what happens if a fire breaks out somewhere this year or a roof flies off?
And what happens to the released pets and zoo animals?
Is this maneuver to save the planet wise or dictatorial?
Will it cost fewer victims than if everything went on as before?
In this way, Kruckemeyer revs up his theatrical experimental set-up, and the great Hamburg ensemble develops plastic, captivating characters from the cleverly conceived theses.
Sandra Gerling cleverly plays the speaker Emily, who came up with artificial sleep and who starts out as a convincing office mouse and ends up being a cunning media agitator.
Josef Ostendorf sits in a wheelchair in Bogotá as an old woman who is not happy because a year of life has been stolen from her.
Samuel Weiss is the Australian minister alert to push through the snooze project, Daniel Hoevels is his clairvoyant spin doctor.
While mankind settles into forced rest, Stölzl shows photos of climate catastrophes between Ahr Valley and Pakistan on a huge screen, accompanied live by sound film music.
However, two people surprisingly stay awake because the gas cannot damage their synthetic lungs, which were implanted after an illness.
The last lovers in a deserted city
Maggie and Pete make their way through their deserted town in bizarre ways, but they don't escape innocent, and when they meet, they become lovers.
With enchanting tenderness and hybrid violence, Lina Beckmann and Mehmet Ateşçi show how the two dare to communicate again after months of loneliness and speak of the past and present in a time of standstill - on the one hand detached from the strange circumstances, on the other hand tangled up in them like fish in plastic waste.
"The Long Sleep" is not a good piece in its attempted dramaturgical heterogeneity, and the conservative narrative, increasingly empty staging is artistically rather poor.
But all in all, the performance is a great coup: thematically topical and rousing, brilliantly played and collectively challenging food for thought.