Datterich

In the organizer's words:

If you drink enough, you'll see twice as much of the world! With this promise of knowledge, Datterich orders one pint after another. And when the necessary small change is running out, and it's always running out, the pensioner knows how to help himself: For a good drop, he fleeces the shoemaker, sweet-talks the landlady and, with a pleasurable penetrating attitude, coaxes the journeyman lathe operator Schmidt into a dignified intoxication.

The local farce about the survivalist Datterich is almost 200 years old and has been performed since 1925 by the Hessische Spielgemeinschaft, which was founded at the time. To this day, the southern Hessian jargon is so close to the sound of Datterich that it is debatable whether Ernst-Elias Niebergall was able to canonize the Darmstadt dialect with this comedy or whether Darmstadt instead babbles in the soft words and phrases that Niebergall put into the mouth of Datterich and his drinking buddies.

Darmstadt's dialect is also what helped the play to become a success, although it would hardly be understood in most German-speaking theaters. However, a High German Datterich is unimaginable, because it is only in the linguistic condensation that this farce becomes world theater in a local setting - in wine taverns, to be precise. As in a documentary milieu study, Niebergall shows almost arbitrarily profane everyday splinters from the bars of the old town. In a small, in this production almost two-dimensional world, the audience encounters episodic set pieces of the comedy: love confusion, a deceived swindler, a persecuted debtor, the racist world view of a conceited intellectual. Nothing and no one is immune to being made fun of by Datterich. For all his criticism of the petty bourgeoisie, Datterich himself - despite all his sophistication - remains one of the detested petty bourgeoisie. In sober terms, perhaps even the least of them.

Just like its hero, this theater text stands on its own. Despite all attempts to hype up Datterich as Woyzeck's twin and Niebergall as a world-class playwright, this summer's Schwank remains what it has always been: the best piece of popular theater from, about and for the best city in southern Hesse.

So entertaining, you'll have to see it twice!