They are predators but they just want to play.

Martha and George, married for more than two decades, are failures in life but unequaled in the sordid art of wallowing in their defeats.

From their self-pity they forge their anger, which in turn coagulates into self-pity, because the pain they gleefully inflict on the other, they also feel in their own bodies.

As if they were one flesh.

So they have set themselves up bloodily and comfortably in an eternal cycle of meanness, injuries, humiliation.

Hubert Spiegel

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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They are addicts who can conveniently create the stuff they need to survive.

And indeed, they would be the perfect mating machine in the penal colony of an American provincial university - the poisonous sting and the soft flesh, the smooth blade and the bare throat, intimately connected in endlessly changing torment variations - if it weren't for one more little thing.

From time to time they need an audience to expose and cover, to despise and woo.

So this play is about two couples, two generations, two genders, two failed marriages.

Edward Albee's gender war drama Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf is now sixty years old.

How does a generation, for whom life-work balance and vegan nutrition are often more important than managerial posts and drinking in a pack for the purpose of professionally useful social networking, look at Albee's toxic cocktail, which soaks the American dream in cynicism and alcohol like a prepared corpse?

The female figures Martha and Honey, drawn not without misogyny, are shaped by their origins and deformed by their overpowering fathers, one a corrupt university rector, the other a greedy preacher.

The historian George and the biologist Nick, their husbands, are judged by their professional success and traditional masculinity ideals such as athleticism and potency.

The snapdragon bit

The stage is a spirits depot poorly disguised as a living room.

Instead of one house bar, there are three;

two of them are so big that you can even disappear into them.

As if a giant snapdragon had bitten off a chunk, a large jagged hole yawns in the fourth wall.

Has the demolition work already started on the outer facade while the celebrations are still going on inside?

It's two o'clock in the morning, the party is over, in the next few hours one nightcap will follow the next, by the liter.

Is George, the history professor and his father-in-law's outcast crown prince, already broken or still flexible?

Konstantin Bühler left the question open for a long time.

His George wears a tight green three-piece suit with brass buttons and a hairdo that not even a bald guy would envy.

The costumes, designed by stage designer Dorothee Curio, refer to the late 1960s or early 1970s and have a great sense of meaningful detail.

This applies to the entire staging, which listens to the text, carefully structures its rhythm, fires off the dialogues like a high-speed Mikado with razor blades, but also endures complete silence.

Then only the looks and bodies speak.

The choreography of the leg positions alone is worth seeing.