Why does someone sign up voluntarily for military service? What are our soldiers doing every day in Afghanistan? What does one do when it is impossible to forget the images from one’s service. And how does it feel to return to society having risked one’s life on a mission abroad, a mission that was even of no personal interest? We have created a scenic-musical kaleidoscope based around interviews from active and former army soldiers, focussing on the reports, impressions and experiences of soldiers stationed abroad.
with: Andreas Jeßing, Nikolaus Kühn, Bernhard Meyer, Karl Miller, Leif Scheele, Martin Schnippa und Sängern des Göttinger Knabenchors
directing: Julia Roesler
research: werkgruppe2 & Anna Gerhards
music: Insa Rudolph
stage design: Nicola Antonia Schmid
costume design: Julia Schiller
dramaturgy: Anna Gerhards
text: Julia Roesler & Isabelle Stolzenburg
“A director and two dramaturgs in Göttingen have made a play from interview material of former German soldiers overseas – a troublesome, calm and concentrated evening… They intelligently do not try to create an atmosphere of war but the feeling of being foreign and the slight discomfort is there… All of this is presented in calm, contemplative scenes without lamentation or the use of effects and external gestures to impress.”
Deutschlandfunk/ Hartmut Krug
“The director Julia Roesler has made a theatre evening (from interviews with soldiers) which is impressive as well as worrying and in some aspects hard to stomach, formed in a grand atmosphere. The Göttingen ‘Soldiers’ are just as sick as the society they serve as it plays a debatable role in the cracks of the globalised world; they are poor pigs and sometimes they themselves are to blame.”
Nachtkritik/ Michael Laages
“Then in the play, the audience are given two crates of Göttingen beer. Presents make for a friendly mood, alcohol sedates. Roesler uses this craftily in order to offer up the most disgusting sentences – such as hate towards muslims, lust triggered by violence, terror fantasies, homophobia. Authentically frightening.”
Deutsche Bühne/ Jens Fischer
produced by werkgruppe2, co-produced with Deutsches Theater in Göttingen. A Cooperation with Knabenchor Göttingen