Director Laura Linnenbaum stages Jakob Nolte’s contemporary adaptation of Maxim Gorki’s Kinder der Sonne (“Children of the Sun”) as a two-and-a-half-hour dense milieu study of a bourgeois society running on empty. In doing so, the production comes alarmingly close to the present day. The first thing you notice is the floor. Sticky, glittering black, it covers the entire stage of the Neues Haus. It creeps up the lampposts and transforms the garden of a villa on the outskirts of town into a place you would rather not touch, somewhere between an oil spill, rare earth, and burnt asphalt. Whatever stage designer Daniel Roskamp has laid down forces the characters to keep moving, as if standing still on this hostile surface was painful. The protagonists keep slipping and sliding, much like the words that tumble unchecked from their mouths. Three intellectuals, a literary scholar, his wife, and his traumatized sister, live in a house with a perpetually broken garden gate. They are courted by a businesswoman, a painter, and a veterinarian. Meanwhile, the housekeeper, a craftsman, and the landlord remain at the margins, often literally. Everyone talks with each other, against each other, mostly past each other. No one is particularly likable. They are all antiheroes. And yet you find yourself involuntarily caught up as the drama unfolds. It is not easy to surrender to the play right away. The double strain of staged and real reality weighs heavily. But once you allow yourself to become immersed, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of a frenzied linguistic maelstrom about the relevance and futility of the educated bourgeoisie. What remains is an exceptionally sharp character study of an educated society, without moral judgment.
Text: Hilka Dirks / Photos: Gianmarco Bresadola
Berliner Ensemble, Bertolt-Brecht-Platz 1, 10117 Berlin–Mitte; map
Kinder der Sonne (Children of the Sun) until 26.04.2026
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