Bambi & Die Themen
Sun 23.04. 15:00
About
Bambi is a deer and carries all the questions of this world inside him. But one day he can't find any answers and his forest burns down. The furious Internet enters his life and nothing makes sense anymore. Bambi, Thumper and Skunk Flower live in a shared flat and try to live a good life. They are looking for a language for their powerlessness and excessive demands in a world full of problems. In it, it doesn't always seem clear whether reality is dystopian or just their own experience. The characters are serious, funny, loving, but also melancholic, desperate and always full of longing for clarity and eternal friendship.
Bonn Park's plays are presented at the Heidelberger Stückemarkt, the Stückemarkt of Theatertreffen Berlin and at the Mülheimer Theatertage. Park's first theater experience was at the youth club P 14 at the Berliner Volksbühne. In 2018, his work "Three Billion Sisters" received the Friedrich Luft Prize and he was named best young director by Theater heute in 2019.
Credits
Cast: Ali Aykar, Felicia Chin-Malenski, Eduard Lind, Eva Maria Schindele & Ensemble
Director and text: Bonn Park
Stage, costume, puppets: Paula Wellmann
Music: Moritz Löwe
Lighting design: Thomas Krammer
Puppet making: Katja Schümann-Forsen, Silvia Riehm-Dombek
Mask making: Silke Adams
Puppet play consulting: Anna Zamolska, Anton Bachleitner
Dramaturgy: Kirstin Hess
Theatre Pedagogue: Thiemo Hackel
Vote
"Why is my forest on fire and why is that fine with everyone?" Bambi the deer has many questions. His friends burned to coal, his world is exploding around him "like a tube TV set" - and yet somehow everything just seems to keep on going. How can that be? And what's wrong: Bambi's perception or the world’s? Bonn Park, writer and director of "Bambi & The Themes," sets the three main characters of the Disney film in a dystopian scenario. No healthy forest, anywhere. In the set, the forest fire is set to last, dinosaurs topple the cardboard skyscrapers of the miniature metropolis, a cardboard nuclear missile pierces the horizon in slow motion. Threats are omnipresent in this collapsing universe, and disorientation dominates. The question that Bonn Park poses in his piece is philosophical: Is there a right kind of life in the wrong one? Hardly. A general discomfort carries over into the production. Something is not right. Gentle is the tone in which the characters negotiate everyday cruelties and attack one another in a passive aggressive manner. "Is there hovering anxiety?", Blume and Klopfer ask their friend Bambi. There the latter has just strung up his dead ringer, a miniature version of himself as a puppet, with its strings on a window cross. "No," Bambi flutes. "That's suicide." This stage work does not shy away from taboos and unpleasant insights. And in doing so, it captures the attitude towards life of a generation that knows that its existence will no longer be as comfortable and trite as that of its parents. Too many things are not right – no intact forest, anywhere. And in the end, not all is well. Resisting the idyll, the production, a reverse reading of the Disney film shot in 1942 during World War II, convinced us as an impressive artistic setting. Youth theater can be both brave and contemporary.
Elena Philipp
Content Note
In Bambi und die Themen, the topics addressed include, death, physical, mental or sexual violence, serious illness (physical and psychological), war and environmental disasters, suicide, cruelty to animals, child abuse, addictions, blood, sex. Discrimination based on ethnic groups, religion, gender or gender diversity, social background, sexual orientation, age, disability and appearance is addressed. Some viewers may find this disturbing.
There is fog and darkness in places, so sensory stimuli can be stimulated by the smell.
Watch at your own risk, so decide for yourself whether you might feel triggered by the play or not.
