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Bertold Brecht's „Kleinbürgerhochzeit“ at Dortmund Theatre
Written by Program Assistant Jana Aßmann
Marrying someone means deciding to life with someone for the rest of your life – in good and bad times. When the bad times already start on your wedding day, then something went very, very wrong. Brecht's „Kleinbürgerhochzeit” („The Wedding“), directed by Charlotte Zilm, AIB lecturer of the NEP Theatre Program, shows how a wedding can be if the worst comes to the worst. For the small group of Theatre students who made a trip through the Ruhr Valley in order to watch that action-packed and tragicomical play in Dortmund, it was not only a possibility to experience a play by a famous German author but also to learn a lot about stage design, the construction of different characters, facial expressions, comedy of situation and comedy of characters. Even though the play was in German, the students understood some parts of the dialogues and jokes.
„Die Kleinbürgerhochzeit“ is a play for nine persons: The newly-weds, the bride's father and sister, the grooms mother, a friend of the groom, another marryied couple, and the son of the caretaker. Everybody is sitting at a long table in the living room of the bridal couple's house, self-made furniture (!) around them, wedding presents on the shelves behind them, and food and wine in front of them. The characters are smiling – the party can begin!
It doesn't take a minute until the characters' happy facade starts to crumble. The bride's father is boring and annoing the other guests with his longbreathed stories about uncles dying of dropsy and people eating to much codfish. The groom forgets to dance the first dance with his wife. Instead, he asks her friend, a begrudging and sarcastic woman. The bride, on the other hand, dances intensely with the groom's friend who is already drunk, doesn't care about him touching her, and even seems to like the closeness of his perspiring body and pudding-sprinkled clothes. The bride's sister is flirting with the caretaker's son, and doesn't even shy away from sleeping with him „behind the scenes“.
The more the audience sees, the more it becomes clear that these friends celebrating a wedding aren't friends at all and that the party will be a disaster. The conflictual atmosphere created by the characters' dialogues is accompanied by the breaking apart of the furniture: The chairs loose their legs, the table crashes as the groom wants to dance upon it, and the cupboard's lock won't open. In this spirit, the furniture can be seen as a symbol for the wedding itself: What was intended to last forever doesn't stand the test and breaks apart.
When the guests are gone and bride and groom can finally celebrate their wedding night, everything is destroyed, the floor is smeared with wine and chocolate pudding, and the newly-weds start to argue about who's responsible for this catastrophe. In a last attempt to save the wedding night, the couple francticly undresses and enters the bedroom. The play ends with a big crash – the bed is broken apart.
Despite the long train ride to Dortmund, the trip was more than worth it! Everbody was laughing a lot and it was a great experience to watch that elaborated and breathtaking play. The students were able to collect some impressions of how to construct a one-act-play, create comical effects by using not only the dialogues, but also food, drinks, clothes, and furniture. It was an inspiring and entertaining evening!
