Journalist’s trips are full of incredible findings. For example, when you come to a film festival, you come across a theater premiere and forget about all films in the world. Hallelujah (Reservation) staged by 65-year-old Christoph Marthaler, an outstanding Swiss director, in the genre of old good variety review in Berlin-based Volksbuehne (People’s Theater).
Hallelujah starts in the lobby, where in a specially equipped hut under a neon cross there is a church (altar, candles, and remains of wafer) and something like a small flat, with one of the rooms covered with photos of puppies and half-naked girls from old magazines. This statement about the everyday life reality shows the aesthetics of the show that will begin any moment now and draws the audience into a game: we have been at home, now we all are culturally recreating. On the stage there is an abandoned park with dried and littered pool, an overthrown dinosaur statue, and awkward benches (the Reservation Park indeed existed in GDR). There is an overweight woman wearing glasses on her gloomy face. The reality we can easily recognize.
Those who come here look like residents of a poverty-stricken post-Soviet suburb – they are wearing some clothes, up to sports outfits and plastic raincoats. They are building fences near the ticket office and standing in line.
What are they doing here? They are having fun, of course.
Is there any one of us who listened to favorite singers in our youth and did not imagine themselves in their place? Actually, the heroes take up namely these roles, putting on more effective costumes, becoming irresistibly artistic – someone looks like a rodeo star, another one – exactly like Dean Reed (an American rock musician who emigrated to GDR), someone even assert themselves as striptease dancers. They sing and accompany themselves alive. This is the repertoire that enchanted the youth in the 1970s – from the country music star Dolly Parton to evergreen Bonny M and David Bowie.
There are no dialogs, but there are monologs between the numbers. The texts are based on the interviews taken from specially gathered Berlin residents who remember the entertainment industry of the Communist time. The confessions about the past and present-day life are funny and touching, and in combination with music, which provides a necessary dimension of imagination, the unobvious drama of this show is created – it is bright, naughty, and melancholic in its sense. After all songs and enlightenments German “Indians” finally close their reservation from the strangers and surround it with a fence. And they feel good, even free, there, because they have their faith of neon and tape recorder. Hallelujah.
But I have an idea which can hardly be realized in Ukraine: to make a similar show here, about its music, dreams, and lost time.
