58. “Waidwund”

Play in three acts by Richard Skowronnek
Performance at the Königliches Schauspielhaus, Berlin

I would never have thought that the incredibly bad play "Die Einzige", which we enjoyed last week at the Schauspielhaus, could be followed by an equally bad one this week. Screwed characters live in impossible circumstances, and what happens to them defies description. You would have to be completely unaware of any human individuality if you wanted to enjoy these dolls. All conceived, all put together at the desk. It is quite impossible to tell the story. The absolute nonsense cannot be described in a few sentences, but it can be told in a three-act drama. Anyone who wanted to put it into words would have to make sense of it. To talk about it rationally would be to falsify it. One left the theater with a feeling that can only be compared to the physical feeling of a rotten stomach. While attending this performance, I reconciled myself with "Ash Wednesday", which I saw a few days ago at the Neues Theater. It's a wild joke, but unpretentious. It wants to be nothing more than a ragout of great jokes that you laugh at if you're not a philistine idealist who is always ready with aesthetics. Afterwards, when you've laughed, you feel devilishly stupid. But you have just laughed. And with Skowronnek you can neither laugh nor cry. But no, you do laugh! You laugh when the poet performs his stirring scenes. That's when his art really becomes "ridiculous".