Das Programmheft als PDF Download - Staatstheater Braunschweig

Schauspielkunst »Ernst Busch« Berlin begann. Für seine
Inszenierung im dritten Studienjahr hat er Leonhard Franks
Roman erstmals für die Bühne bearbeitet und uraufgeführt.
Im Umgang mit einem nahezu in Vergessenheit geratenen
Stück Literatur der Weimarer Republik findet Kubisch einen
verblüffenden Spiegel des Hier und Jetzt.
»I know nothing. Absolutely nothing!«, exclaims Jürgen Kolbenreiher,
son of a banker, and goes on a search for the correct
life amidst all the wrong ones led around him. If economical
differences are at the same time social ones, and
if an authoritarian mindset, greed and arrogance generate
a conglomerate out of injustice and political madness, this
world needs to change. Yet how can the dedicated middleclass
man possibly achieve that?
Kolbenreiher, prototype of a generation stuck between rebellion
and resignation, almost tries out all the possibilities
there are: he becomes a political activist, an opportunist,
a realist, a hedonist, and again – an idealist. He sees the
whites of his enemy’s eyes, but only to behold himself, time
and time again.
Leonhard Frank called his novel »A Middle-Class Man«, published
in 1924, his »socialist novel« and dedicated it to the
»youth of the middle-class« – which he saw straying in a jungle
of worldviews: »People, their whole lives mentally at risk,
madhouse or suicide! Or, at best, a wincing nervous wreck at
thirty years old!«
Simon Kubisch, born in 1983, was musician, author and short
film maker before taking up studies in stage direction at the
»Ernst Busch« Academy of Dramatic Art Berlin in 2009. For
his third-year production, he adapted Leonhard Frank’s novel
for the stage for the very first time and premiered it as well.
Dealing with an almost forgotten piece of literature from the
Weimar Republic, Kubisch discovers striking parallels to our
times.
18 Der Bürger / Deutschland
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