Smear theater
Farce (perhaps from Yiddish זמרה simrah "singing"; suitable are etymological derivations from little careful "Together smearing" of the plays or from the cheap Province printers - the name grease for this can be traced back to the 16th century) is a derogatory term for superficial and improperly done theater , for example with chargeable actors. In the past, the expression often referred to the petty bourgeois or proletarian antics - or vaudeville theater (“... however he first learned the smear theater in the Scheunenvierteland then get to know the demanding German theater ”). Sometimes the word is also used in the sense of the German “smear” (imprecise execution) ( Peter Zadek : “The performance of spring awakening was very precise and not smeared”).
Especially in the time of the emerging bourgeois city and state theaters in the 19th century, the touring theaters with their more limited means and their old-fashioned way of playing were disqualified as smear theater. The comedy Raub der Sabinerinnen (1884) by the brothers Franz and Paul von Schönthan is a parody of such a smear theater . In the famous Striese monologue (Act II), the main character praises the smear theater.
In the course of a renaissance of entertainment theater around 1900, the smear theater was rediscovered and revived in an artificial way, for example by Max Reinhardt with his cabaret Schall und Rauch . This positive effect persisted in the cabaret of the 20th century, for example in the name of the Frankfurt theater Die Schmiere (since 1950).
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heinz Küpper : Dictionary of German everyday language. dtv, Munich 1971, vol. 2, p. 325.
- ^ Norbert Altenhofer, Renate Heuer : Hidden Readings: New Interpretations of Jewish-German Texts from Heine to Rosenzweig , Frankfurt a. M .: Campus 2003, p. 84.
- ↑ Interview with Peter Zadek in Welt online (June 15, 2008)
