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Gott

Woody Allen

An author and an actor, about 500 years BC, argue about the outcome of a play they want to perform at the Athens Drama Festival. However, since they are only acting in another play, the one by Woody Allen, they soon engage in a dialogue with the audience, which also turns out to be fictional. Fiction and reality are mediated with each other in such a way that both are disputed in their claim to be art and reality, respectively. The solution is only technically possible: an inventor offers the author, whoever he may be, a closing machine with which Zeus always flies in at the exit of the plays. However, since the machine, which is used at the climax of the drama, fails, Zeus, who flies in, strangles himself, and God is dead.

Compared to Woody Allen's texts, the one who wants to understand always remains the stupid one, as they elude each other again and again in almost panic. Not only the progressive abolition of the levels brought into play each time, which always claim to be reality, irritates the recipient; also the deliberate, almost regressive use of so-called comic elements, which descend to the bleakest of corny jokes, and none is spared, makes the texts puzzling. There his characters resist any kind of determination, struggle with all the claims that the culture industry has produced for the labeling of the arts; an author, who is only an actor in the play of the author Woody Allen, does not know an ending for his play, and the original author, questioned by telephone, only attests that he does not know it either, that he should be informed about the outcome of the evening.

All patterns, ancient and modern, for guiding artistic production are lost, there are neither positive nor negative solutions to conflicts, there are no real conflicts any more, since this would presuppose the confrontation of different interests; but the formation of interests has become impossible in a world determined by rapid independence. What remains to be described is the anarchic structure of a society, for the New Yorker Woody Allen a potpourri of McDonald's restaurants and pretentious philosophical themes, solely for the purpose of enforced physical as well as psychological self-preservation.

Woody Allen, born in 1935, is one of the most important filmmakers and is in the tradition of the Marx Brothers and Charlie Chaplin. Both in his literary materials and in his films, he dissects with aggressive comedy the social conditions today that deny the happiness that all his characters are after after all. The cunning of reason, arguably one with the comic, however, always forces results that arise above people's heads and degrade them to impotent decals of an anonymous whole that can only be survived with anarchic humor.

Information

Location

Theater an der Ruhr
Akazienallee 61
45478 Theater an der Ruhr

Cast

Team

  • Roberto Ciulli
    Director
  • Helmut Schäfer
    Dramaturgy
  • Heinke Stork
    Costumes

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