
The third generation puts everything on the table that one can think or believe once one is beyond numbness induced by horror, violent bossiness, dogmatic justice and the commandment »Don't compare!«.
So the stereotypes of those favorite roles of the victim and perpetrator are
being overturned hilariously. But: No suffering, pain, trauma or insecurity, no
inner wounds are being treated without respect or mocked, but only that which
is supposed to protect the wounded souls: ritualized mechanisms of supppression on all sides and that fatal automatism of brushing things under the
carpet.
- Berliner Morgenpost
Harrowing, oppressive, nightmarishing, so polemic as didactic but most of all
extremely funny and ultimately liberating. An option on future.
- Reinhard Wengierek, Die Welt
No better way to show how loosely resentment is being worn under the neat
little coat of political correctness than Niels Bormann's highly embarrassed
sermon of begging forgiveness.(…) Ronen confronts clichés and resentments
incredibly smartly and with dizzying speed so that both fall apart hopelessly
and the wound is being exposed.
- Christine Wahl, Tagesspiegel
In Yael Ronen's speedy play the German, Jewish and Palestinian actors heave
their family histories, injuries and gestures of dismay at each other and let them
crash. Often it's not possible to distinguish between the character and the
actor, not only because the actors address each other by their real names and
look exposed and private in the course of these rapid, seemingly improvised
scenes on this vast empty stage. (…)
The production is one long assault on the ceremonial routines of a well established culture of institutionalised remembrance. (…) Nothing about the production is cynical. To mock the families of the survivors is so far from Yael Ronens mind as it is from George Taboris who has lost most of his family during the Holocaust. Inherent in the embarrassment of failing communication between the perpetrators and victims of the third generation after Auschwitz there is a sort of objective, inevitable pain. It brings to light the impossibility of doing justice to such a singular crime against humanity by way of communicating in some way or even by way of "processing" it - a term that Adorno was suspicious of.
Although Ronens production is governed by a very humorous lightness we
often choke on our laughter. The comedy, like in Taboris bitter comedies, is
born from mourning and helplessness in the face of the unspeakable.
- Süddeutsche Zeitung