ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Berlin Porcupines Not So Fretful

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31135, 11 August 1966, Page 13

ARTS AND ENTERTAINMENT Berlin Porcupines Not So Fretful

(By

PAUL MOOR.

in the

"Financial times ' Reprinted bu arrangement)

Satire, like the most substantial kind of humour, thrives best in the acid soil of adversity. Let the living-standard rise, the belt expand a notch or two. let butter replace the margarine, and satire, like its audience, all too often shows disheartening signs of adiposity. The German term Kabarett has a meaning all its own, and has nothing whatever to do with the French and English cabaret. Kabarett implies a small, usually badly ventilated and smoke-filled room with a tiny stage on which an ensemble of between four and six performers, usually young and saucy, stick pins in every conceivable sacred cow, assisted in the songs by a pianist and perhaps one or two other musicians. The French chansonniers and such rare revues as “Beyond the Fringe” and “That Was The Week That Was” come as close to Kabarett as anything I have encountered outside Germany. FIRST PHOENIXES One can imagine what happened to Kabarett under the

Nazis, but its modest physical requirements made it one of the first artistic phoenixes to rise from the rubble of 1945. Those horrid but hopeful days provided rich soil for a true Kabarett revival, and they popped up everywhere, attracting some of the brightest angriest, most devastatingly funny actors, writers and composers who had come through the holocaust alive. The three best companies emerged as Munich’s I Die kleine Freiheit (subsequently eclipsed by Die L a c h • u n d Scniess-Gesell-chaft). Dusseldorf's Das Kom(m)odchen, and Berlin’s Die Stachelschweine. Kabarett thrives on puns, incidentally, and without pedantic footnotes one can translate the name of only the last troupe: The Porcupines. In the best Kabarett tradition, Die Stachelschweine charged admission to their fir A programme after the war not in cash but in buttons, which in those days of an economy founded on American cigarettes had a definite value not to be taken lightly. The Berliners, whose humour had always had a quick, sardonic. sharp cutting-edge unique in Germany, took them to their hearts, and the little company’s first sorties into West Germany established them as a treasured national institution. rid.m- Mocioftskt etaoie tao NOTHING SACRED They regarded absolutely I nothing as sacred, 1 recall one searing, hilarious sketch they did several years ago about two couples, beneficiiaries of Germany’s early postwar “economic miracle.” conversing in a compartment of; I the inter-zonal train between Berlin and West Germany. A young East German Volkspolizist on the train, who has confided to the audience his thoughts about leaving everything behind and risking the fate of a refugee to the West, overhears their chatter during which, for instance, one of the wives mentions poutingly that she has no sports car. “Poor thing, says the other

lone. “don’t you have a car of I your own at all? “Oh, of course—l have a car | and my husband has a car as I well as a company car, but 1 don’t have a sports car.” ■ “Ah, well, don’t forget how few years have passed since J we started the war.” ! “Yes, yes. let’s hope that when the next one comes, we start that one, too.” All—except the indecisive young Vopo—laugh merrily. I waited in vain for such stabs in “The Eleventh Commandment.” the 33rd programme recently unveiled by Die Stachelschweine. What has happened? For one thing,’ the physical surroundings have changed radically, the crowded little room in the Rankstrasse has given way to a chic, modern, much larger proper theatre in the showy new Europa-Center at the Gedachtniskirche. OFF THE GROUND ! Out of a programme lasting over three solid hours, and too long by at least one-third one can list only three or four sketches that get off the ground. Inge Wolffberg. I parodying the indecision of Hamlet’s best-known soliloquy as the housewife driven by TV soap advertising comes across with astonishing comic brilliance as she debates the proper brand for her husband’s long woollies. Achim Strietzel does well with another virtuoso mono-

logue in which he reminisces aloud as he runs through an 1 average German's morning ■mail, which includes, among other things, an invitation from his old army unit to a : reunion on the anniversary ■ of the capture of Minsk. Wolfgang Gruner, as always, delights with his customary [speciality monologue, during I which he steps on more corns 'than does the rest of the evening put together. I’m afraid Gruner sums it up when he talks about what’s happened to Kabarett: “What did Kabarettisten used to get? Beaten up. What do they get to-day? Money.” I certainly do not begrudge it them; I I love them, sincerely, and wish them only the best, and 1 rejoice to hear from one of the group, who last year chose Egypt, that he will spend this years vacation in California. This does not alter the fact that the lean and hungry Stachelschweine of yesteryear offered far better and sharper Kabarett than they have these past three or four years. HOT POTATO A new and aggresive Kabarett in Munich, Das Rationaltheater, has included in its new programme a sketch incorporating explosive disturbingly authenticated Third Reich documents recently unearthed and published in East Germany which indicate that Heinrich Lubke, to-day President of West Germany, supervised the construc-

tion of at least one concentration and slave-labour camp; Das Rationaltheater’s young 'director says he faces the possibility of legal action with equanimity. Die Stachelschweine used to seize such hot potatoes without flinching. I sincerely hope that they soon will again.