GRIPS Theater Berlin

And yet another success: the première
of HEILE HEILE SEGEN in December,
which we really owe to coauthor
Christian Veit's daughter. Her
spell in hospital just before the summer
break gave her father the idea.
Thanks to this hit we could afford to
put in nine months preparation for
our third major youth play ALLES
PLASTIK.
ALLES PLASTIK opened just four days
after the brutal eviction of squatters
from eight occupied houses, resulting
in the death of Jürgen Rattey,
one of the squatters. The play very
deliberately takes sides with the
squatter minority who, for the majority
of the BILD newspaper-reading
secondary schoolchildren were crimi-
nals and no-gooders: But because
the play portrays them as basically
very nice people, grateful teachers
made good use of it to counter the
polarisation in the Berlin school landscape.
A number of meetings came
about between schoolchildren and
squatters who, to the amazement of
the kids, turned out to be just decent
people.
1981 also saw the "2nd International
Children’s and Young People’s
Theatre Festival". The climax was
the guest appearance of the Werkteater
Amsterdam, whom we had always
admired and made friends
with when we met at the Holland
Festival in 1981.
In 1982 we were considering a remake
of our first environment play
but the research soon showed that
WASSER IM EIMER would have been
the wrong play: children no longer
needed it spelled out. They knew
enough about the dangers of a dying
environment in the meantime and
wanted only one thing from us: ideas
for doing something about it.
DICKE LUFT became yet another success.
Something wonderful happened in
the autumn of 1983. One of Germany's
most prominent writers asked
us if she could write a youth
play for GRIPS. It was Leonie Ossowski.
The play VOLL AUF DER ROLLE
was not only the first major youth
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