Lots Good Food

The nerves are on edge: gay marriage, migration, organic vegetables, feminism – provocative topics that not only cause the regulars’ tables and Internet forums to shake. On the one hand, there are the admonitions of the politically correct, and on the other, the contradiction: “It’s still okay to say that. In this mixture of constant “Outrage!” a man steps out – or rather: to the home stove – and gives free rein to his thoughts and words, while he cooks a multi-course meal for his wife and son from the finest ingredients (another contemporary phenomenon). White, heterosexual, well-bourgeois and healthy, he hasn’t quite achieved the expected professionally, hasn’t quite started the family he had hoped for, and now his residential district is also being gentrified and will probably soon be unaffordable. A frighteningly normal “loser,” but one who was promised winning from birth.

In Viel gut essen, author Sibylle Berg lets a modern Everyman rant, complain and argue about the state of our society. The “voice of the people” speaks from him, so openly and honestly that it becomes … increasingly unpleasant. The “feel good” food turns into an explosive cocktail of self-pity and anger. Something is brewing in the state of Germany.

Sibylle Berg, who has won many awards for her works and is one of the most important German-language playwrights, novelists (Ein paar Leute suchen das Glück und lachen sich tot; Vielen Dank für das Leben; GRM – Brainfuck), as well as an alert contemporary diagnostician in columns and Twitter style gems, wrote this blackly humorous text in 2014, in a sense parallel to the emergence of the Pegida movement. To this day, even more so in the year of the Bundestag elections, this monologue is like looking through the keyhole of a nation. Berg skilfully balances between misery and cynicism. Between breaking taboos in a political discourse perceived as mendacious and sheer, toxic racism.

Director Anna Stiepani is also interested in the personal, human core of this politically incorrect everyman in her production – staged as a film for Corona’s sake. Much of what Sibylle Berg has him say sounds reactionary or socially fascist. Nevertheless, it is harder than one might think to distance oneself from it. Therein lies the danger.

The play Viel gut essen by Sibylle Berg has been published as an e-book. Read more here.