How to Date a Feminist

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How to Date a Feminist is a 2016 play by British author Samantha Ellis .

First performed in London at the Arcola Theater by Matthew Lloyd, Tom Berish and Sarah Daykin played the six roles in the comedy.

The play had its German-language premiere on December 15, 2018 at the Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe . Here, too, two actors ( Tom Gramenz , Lucie Emons) play all six roles.

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Steve, son of the political activist Morag, is the feminist eponymous hero. When he first met the journalist Kate, he began to apologize for the patriarchy. She, however, daughter of the religious and conservative Joe, likes bastards like Heathcliff, the antihero from Emily Brontë's Storm Heights . In the end, she only asks Steve to make her ex-boyfriend Ross jealous for the time being. And Steve also has an ex-girlfriend, the sculptor Carina. The two encounter resistance from Morag and Joe. They get closer, but 90 minutes after the marriage, the two of them break up. Because they can't cope with the fact that Joe and Morag have something to do with each other. Carina finally wants to win Steve back and another wedding is due.

German-language premiere

Actors: Tom Gramenz (Steve, Joe, Ross), Lucie Emons (Kate, Morag, Carina)

Director: Jenny Regnet, stage: Anne Horny, costumes: Jamil Sumiri, musical direction & composition: Felix Kusser, dramaturgy: Nele Lindemann

Premiere: December 12, 2018, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe .

Translation: Silke Pfeiffer

Staging

As in the original, the six roles are played by two actors on the fly. In addition to shedding the attitudes of the two heroes, the Karlsruhe production focuses on the imprinting of the parents who, like Steve and Kate, were abandoned by their partners.

The musically initiated removals suddenly show Steve and Kate, who playfully resist becoming their own parents. They flee from the narrow green garden into the hall and put the distortions on themselves: Kate's Jewish father Joe appears first as a large upper body box with suspenders, Steve's feminist mom Morag as a yellow caterpillar in a yellow wool tube (costumes: Jamil Sumiri) who almost devours her son in the green salad garden (stage: Anne Horny).

With regard to the musical themes, especially the parent figures (musical direction and composition: Felix Kusser), these slowly turn out to be metamorphoses: the faceless yellow caterpillar with a large mouth becomes a yellow sweater and then a scarf that Morag wears. And the box is also shrinking to give an actor who is growing into a real Joe more space.

This is how the concept succeeds in playing with the expectations of the audience. Finally, after Morag repeated the sentence addressed to her son that she was his best friend, with sheer insane penetrance to individual viewers: "his best friend, his best friend". With bizarre ideas, the actual romantic comedy develops with the ever increasing breaks into a break with the genre of the noble boulevard. In the finale, the two actors shed their skin from figure to figure at an extremely fast pace. And the conventional happy ending is also called into question by the closing music.

Reviews

All roles are designed for two actors. To this end, wrote A Younger Theater : "Berish is particularly impressive, so much so that the audience forgets in his transformation into Joe that he once portrayed the liberal, sensitive Steve and can only think of the conservative father figure, which they see in front of this. Multi-role switching is also especially noticeable in a culmination battle, where the actors are constantly vacillating between characters. Their physicality and accents change instantly so the audience can easily tell which person is speaking. "

"The contrasts become grotesque in the form of his mother and her father. The super-emanze (lived in a women's camp against the nuclear war) and the Chauvi immigrants (also religious) are so exaggerated that even the two actors Literally running away from the roles at first. [...] That's so shrill, but then you notice after a third that the director has simply played clever with the expectations. With each change of costume to another appearance of the two parents, theirs shrink Cliché insignia and behavior together. The two main characters also speak much more slogan-like to the audience at first. As the process progresses, they humanize beings facing each other. One begins to hear a crackling between the two in the comedic noise. The actors Emons and Gramenz brush against them Attitudes off, layer by layer, without striking key moments. [...] The music selection captivates with loving details ls: When the woman initially teaches the man to dance bitchy, Fake Blood's "I like it" is playing, a song in whose music video a makeover ends in disaster. This symbolizes the piece and the staging. The characters initially want to conform to a concept, but eventually they change in order to achieve what they really want: to be together despite different influences. "(Nachtkritik)

"On the level of action, Ellis apparently uses the forms of the noble boulevard, works with many clichés that are broken again immediately. Kate and Steve are two reflective characters who keep getting into situations that overwhelm them because they collide with their thought drawers. Man can also call it a ludicrous construction, a machine that first has to overturn at high speeds in order to get on the right track in the end. But Ellis pushes this madness even further by having one player and one player all six roles lets play, so Kate, Carina and Morag, Steve's mother, and Steve, Ross and Joe, Kate's father. The role changes go quickly. Towards the end the pace is increased here, too, at the end without a costume change . [...] A feeling for timing and speed. The way Joe's costume is staged is exemplary: for the first appearance an oversized cardboard costume, for the second The appearance of the body is shrunken and then normal on the third. The shrinking of Kate's super-ego cannot be demonstrated more clearly in this sequence. [...] With Lucie Emons and Tom Gramenz, Jenny Regnet develops a successful production, in which direct contact is often sought with the audience and in some places in the auditorium played. Despite all the eloquence, Lucie Emons plays her roles with refreshing naivety, the transformations are precisely set. Tom Gramenz is a comedic talent who takes on his roles with tremendous pleasure. "(The German stage)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Ayoungertheatre.com