Café Populaire Royal

In the organizer's words:

"Tonight's topic is classism, yes, not classicism". That's a typical Nora Abdel Maksoud sentence. Her texts The Making-Of, The Sequel and Rabatt have run and run with great success at the Gorki. But you can't get enough of Abdel-Maksoud's bitter humor. And so it's high time that her successful play Café Populaire was also shown in its own Berlin version - that's why Royal! - in Berlin. Four characters who try nothing less than to remain "humornistic" - another Abdel Maksoudian neologism combining humor and humanism. There is Svenja, who lives precariously as an artist with an educated middle-class background and keeps her head above water as a hospice clown. Püppi, an old-left salon communist, is a resident of the hospice and, after the death of her husband, is looking for a new operator for the "Gasthaus zum Spatzen", a pub with a cabaret stage and Svenja's distant dream. What could be more obvious than letting Svenja take over the "Spatzen"? This is where the other two characters come into play. Aram, a "service proletarian" with a migrant background, enters the ring in the battle for the inheritance. But is he really as needy as he pretends to be? A real worker should get the "sparrow". That's what Püppi wants. But do they even still exist? And then there's Don, the fourth in the group and technically a part of Svenja. He is the narrator, commentator and her evil neoliberal spin-off and says everything that she, despite our supposed cosmopolitanism, often thinks but doesn't dare to say. Café Populaire Royal gets to the heart of the matter with a lot of wit and esprit and also questions our morals and certainty that we are the good guys.