Today they'd probably form a rock group rather than a political one, and Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof and Gudrun Ensslin would play death metal rather than live it till their deaths. On the stage of Hamburg's Thalia Theater, the RAF veterans have reformed as an OAP band. One standing on a tripod, the other on a dolly, the two erstwhile rivals Gundrun and Ulrike wobble towards each other. Physically disintegrating but ideologically in tact, the RAF setptuageneriennes pose with their Andy, who can no longer close his biker jacket round his belly of affluence, Bond girls and their manchild with the golden Colt, fighting more over him than for a new world order. From the bitch fight with poisoned love, a menage sentimentale. You only live twice – as man and as myth.



All photos © Arno Declair

Older perhaps, but still militant in mind – yet all their geriatric talk of "capital", "action" and "armed fight" has a whiff of dementia, more a case for the AOK (state health insurance) than the BKA (the federal criminal police office). And for contemporary cabaret. Letting the icons age gracefully is the best way to demystify them. Leaving a sort of radical residue. Stammheim is an old age home where even more aged ghosts rattle their chains. Because – and this is Elfriede Jelinek's point - Ulrike and Gudrun are reincarnations of Elisabeth I and Maria Stuart, who – at least in Schiller's version – are fighting for power and men. But the sequel is only a further unfolding of the central female drama, women's application of misogynistic violence on themselves.

Director Nicolas Stemann foils this discourse ironically by having Maria and Ulrike, heads protected by foam vulvas, sing parodies of the feminist laments of Elfriede Jelinek and Marlene Streeruwitz in the broad accent of Austrian slapstick theatre. The director smugly quashes any hagiographic intentions the author may have harboured and has the terror dollies slip out of the stiff robes of royal drama as from the embryonic membrane.



They are young and sexy, Susanne Wolff as Ulrike and Judith Rosmair as Gudrun, the pin-up girls of the revolutionary underground whose portraits adorned the public space of the time, like Kate Moss today, and tantalising as they talk Swabian into the megaphones. But the last and most important re-write of the royal drama was undertaken by reality itself, when it sent Bettina Röhl, Ulrike Meinhof's daughter, to one of the rehearsals in May.

Röhl came, saw and lost it – the falsification of family history, the dangerous idealisation of the RAF trauma. Suspecting that her personality rights had been infringed, she suggested textual changes and, when the theatre didn't oblige, let her lawyers loose. At that point, theatre director Ulrich Khuon pulled in the drawbridges and refused to yield one centimetre of the text to the enemy. Jelinek had only allowed it to be published at the very last minute and it was being guarded, under high security conditions and the sharp eyes of a legal task-force. In the end, everyone gained something: the theatre, a welcome scandal and some free sympathy for breaking open the poison cabinets in defence of artistic freedom, while Jelinek and Röhl shared publicity and perhaps royalties to boot. And the public gloated over the fact that the play had been overtaken by reality. Again, the territorial contentions between artistic freedom and personal rights bubbled to the surface, from Maxim Biller's "Esra" to the prohibition of the cannibal flick "Rohtenburg."



Indeed the lawyers on the other side must have had a hard time coming up with supporting material in the heavily mined surfaces of Jelink's post-dramatic text. Following 'Das Werk' and 'Babel,' 'Ulrike Maria Stuart' is Jelinek's third dramatic text that Stemann doesn't even bother ignoring in order to give it new meaning. This conforms to Jelinek's dream of a director for her world premiere because she applies the renunciation of power typical of her texts on herself and enjoys the desecration as any martyr would. Stemann for his part declares that he is no the clutter-clearing commando for the sentimental detritus of an old lady. Instead of letting Stemann clear out her head, she left it to him entirely. A couple of revolutionary romanticisms remained of a salon lounge in retro-chic style. Stemann deconstructs Jelinek's deconstructions and it's true what the author-mother says about her director son, that her texts 'trigger' his creativity. Stemann loads up and leaves behind scorched landscapes of text, in the form of weapons, water bombs, paint bombs and toy pump guns.

Jelinek accuses the RAF of having compromised the left for decades in advance, making it impossible to know "which way it's developing. Right now it's bed-ridden in hospital". And Stehman has put political nostalgia in the neighbouring bed, with three princes in the tower to keep the ward entertained: Andreas Döhler, Felix Knopp and Sebastian Rudolph as queen clones and drag queens who ham it up with the text. Then the titles flicker across the screen: Bernd Eichinger and Stefan Aust (editor-in-chief of der Spiegel who once freed the Röhl twins from the Sicilian barracks where they had been dragged by the RAF when their mother went underground) present "Downfall 2: The Last Days of Stammheim". This puts on ice any touchy-feeliness about the beasts of the past, because all pores shall close when the princes mouths foam at the mouth while quoting Roman Herzog's "ruck" speech (when as Federal president in 1997 he said a "ruck" or shockwave is what Germany needs to rid it of its outdated structures) which ends: "It's time to shoot."




Songs are performed on Katrin Nottrodt's show stage, under the RAF logo, there is a recorder playing competition by Elisabeth and Maria, a faked collective suicide, and in a parody of the grotesque theatre of the old days, the princes, naked but for the piggy masks over their manhoods, spread out plastic sheeting and hand out paint bombs for the audience to hurl at Gerhard Schröder, Kai Dieckmann (editor-in-chief of the Bild newspaper), chat show host Johannes B. Kerner, head of Deutsche Bank Josef Ackermann and a pint-sized Stefan Aust. Then, when it's time to die, when "it's time for the revolution to eat a child", Ulrike hangs herself, they all sing Robbie Williams' "I will talk and Hollywood will listen" and Benjamin's angel of history makes a cameo appearance.

In Stemann's hands, Jelinek's zombie story becomes intelligent trash and discourse theatre, a casting show for the historical blockbuster, a Halloween schlock horror, whose excoriating humour feeds on the cabin fever of the society of consent. At the end Stemann himself takes the stage, in a Jelinekesque bun wig, to read one of her texts in her Viennese drawl, about fallen gods and redundant TV. Meanwhile a jazz ensemble sings the Jelinek blues which reaches a battle song crescendo. Stehmann rewrites Jelinek for the next generation using the instruments of auto-aggresive cabaret, keeping the flame alive by lighting his torch from hers. But his production also stimulates the appetite to see the tightly rhymed queen drama in its original form again. Coming soon perhaps in Munich or Hanover.

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The article originally appeared in German in the Süddeutsche Zeitung on October 30, 2006.

Christopher Schmidt is a theatre critic for the Süddeutsche Zeitung.

Translation: nb and lp.