REVIEW "DIE ZEIT, EIN FREMDES LAND"
This article was originally published in German. The English version is an automatic translation and may contain errors. The German original is authoritative.
Dr. Emma Richter has a problem: through an unintended experiment, she has landed in the year 2117 with her father and husband. There seems to be no way back, and the family has stumbled completely unprepared into the strange life of the future.
Just as unprepared as the six improvisational actors who brought "Time, a Foreign Land" to the stage on Friday, 27 October, as part of the 16th Würzburg Improvisational Theatre Festival at the Theatre am Neunerplatz. For 90 minutes they slipped into their roles. Only the frame narrative and the characters of the improvised science-fiction piece had been predetermined by directors Lena Försch and Alex Fradera. Around 20:30, Emma's (Kati Schweitzer) voice rang out from off-stage through the packed room: "Hello, hello? Can you hear me? Take us home!" One by one, Emma's relatives and her host family, who have taken in the travellers from the past, enter the living-room setting on stage and congratulate each other on "Community Day". Whilst Emma and her husband Kai (Florian Toperngpong) are allowed to eat the cake with plastic cutlery for this special occasion, Emma ponders with her father Michael (Jörg Zander) how beautiful the celebration was in 2017, when it was still called the old-fashioned "Christmas". These nostalgic memories are completely incomprehensible to the future generation, for everything was much worse back then: everyone thought only of themselves and the world was on the brink of ecological apocalypse. Kai Allegro (Fabian Leven) explains in detail, with the help of cake pieces, the social inequality that still existed in 2017. Allegro is the great pride of his parents Frido (Severin Mahnke) and Ipanema (Julia Pöhlmann), for he recently took an oath to want to shape society. In fact, in the year 2117, everyone lives only "for the community". How reassuring it is to hold the view: "The world does not belong to me. I am entitled to nothing!" Why travel selfishly to Nice when you can look at the world in the Diercke Atlas instead? For this there are all sorts of technical lifestyle tools, such as a flesh-coloured health wristband that constantly measures vital signs, or a mysterious device called "Max" that serves as an oracle providing the answer to almost all of life's questions. With the community as the centre of life, marriage is actually just a functional arrangement in which feelings have no place. Nevertheless, it quickly becomes clear that there is romantic tension between Ipanema and Michael. After a wild kissing scene that leaves the sofa damaged, Ipanema's husband recognises this too and begins to question the collectivist principles of this "brave new world". At the end of the piece, the thoughts and feelings of all those involved are turned upside down, and Emma faces the difficult decision of whether she can return to the past without her husband and father.
Just as the ending did not resolve the tension, the entire piece also delivered entertainment value. Although the plot developed at a rather moderate pace in places, the nature of the improvised performance, with its inherent liveliness, kept the audience captivated throughout. Only once did Fabian Leven seem to have difficulties with the conceptual content, but this fitted well into Allegro's otherwise nervous and insecure character. Overall, the actors, with musical accompaniment on the keyboard by Jan Höcker, brought a socially critical piece to the stage that could have felt as though it came from a fully developed screenplay.
Anna-Sophie Humer-Hager