TROJA
THEATRE PERFORMANCE BY ESTHER PREUSSLER, NINA PELLER AND THILO FISCHER
VOLKSBÜHNE AM ROSA-LUXEMBURG-PLATZ, BERLIN
PREMIERE: 22.03.2016




The whole show, for the first time in 361 degrees. Bring a knife!
It is the most legendary war in our world history. 10,000 ships set sail because of a single woman, Helen of Sparta. What were those times when wars were still fought for love? Yet it all began with a simple beauty contest, the small jibe of an uninvited spoilsport, and ends with an all-destroying, oversized wooden horse. Homer, the Mick Jagger of antiquity, wrote the longest continuous song of all time with the Iliad: the story of two superpowers, stolen treasures and indescribable catastrophes.
It is the battle for Troy, an ancient Dubai. A city so rich, so unattainable and invulnerable naturally arouses desire. Troy burns and crumbles to rubble. But did everything really fall victim to the fire? Did the legendary Troy really exist? Did the Greeks really build a huge horse and thus outwit the Trojans, whose once proud name now stands for nothing but the trick that destroyed them? Or is this horse just an image for an ancient weapon of war? Or for something quite, quite different?
"We're on a mission from god" (Blues Brothers).
But what if you don't want to fight? Just say a quick farewell to your comrades? 10 years of war, that's absurd! There must be some physical or mental infirmity! In Catch 22, Yossarián has the option of being declared insane if he applies for it himself, but this is declared to be proof that he is still quite normal. "Everyone shoots at me. But they are shooting at everyone, then I would be the only crazy one. Not to assume that everyone is shooting at me." (Yossarián)
This is the true story of Troy.
German merchant and amateur archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann stopped at nothing to prove the war for Troy's walls. He gathered all the money he had earned as a businessman in Russia and in the gold rush in California and hired a multitude of poorly paid workers for his month-long private excavations. He dissolved his marriage with a Russian woman and married the Greek girl chosen from a photograph: Sophia, aged 17. She was to become his Helena. With her he wanted to find the mythical city in Turkey. Their children named them Agamemnon and Andromache. No doubt, he was serious. With his important discoveries, he ushered in a new age of archaeological enthusiasm. Be that as it may, neither Homer's Troy nor Priam's treasure nor Agamemnon's mask were among the finds. For Schliemann, nothing stood in the way of a good story - certainly not the truth. Schliemann believed in Troy and thus came to gold and fame - and he became an honorary citizen of Berlin. A whole life for a myth, if that is not an artifice. The 125th anniversary of Schliemann's death has just been celebrated. It is time to take up the cudgels for the great stories before the last of them fall victim to the uniformism of this world. We need more gods again! And those who have no more dreams are already dead anyway.
"I will never get out of this world alive" (Hank Williams)
10 years of war, and then suddenly you conquer the city with a simple trick? The gods disagreed and basically didn't care who won the battle. The main thing was to relieve Mother Earth of the prevailing overpopulation. So promises Zeus in the Kypria, the prehistory of the Iliad. And then the resentment of the godlike fighting Achilles: "immortal man, immortal body, except he had the Achilles heel. What an irony!" (Eddie Izzard). Disguised as a girl, he grows up among stepsisters and refuses for years to take part in the war at all. He is missed at every turn by the heroes from Greece. Only revenge for the death of his lover Patroclus brings Achilles back to the battlefield. And Odysseus, also a sly one, thought of all sorts of ways to avoid having to take part in the battle. He finally thought up the trick with the horse. Time will tell!
But there is no escape from war, not for Odysseus, not for Achilles, not for Yossarián. Or is this world simply no place for peace? And finally, one has the feeling that everything must have been quite different...
Troy lies within you. You just have to prove it.
With: Maximilian Brauer, Konrad Krenzlin, Dennis Latwat, Richard Lucius, Leonard Neumann and Daniel Zillmann
Link: https://volksbuehne.adk.de/praxis/troja/index.html