Berlin, Berlin

It is said that comedy is tragedy viewed from the distance of time. In the play "Berlin, Berlin," a dark story of the communist totalitarian regime is told through much laughter. The action takes place in the divided German capital during the final days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and the characters are agents of the state's repressive secret services, a spy for foreign intelligence, and a young loving couple who wish to escape to the West to live freely. The twists and turns are truly funny, even though we, who lived in the Eastern Bloc behind the Iron Curtain, still suffer from the consequences of the criminal ideology imposed with heavy repression. Can we then laugh at this past, and is it indeed past? Our answer is that we can laugh because laughter heals. However, its healing power works only if we speak of purifying laughter, not mockery. To be purified, one must empathize, understand, and forgive. Therefore, while condemning the crimes, we have endeavored to focus on the emotional impulses that motivated their perpetrators. We aim to show the audience a peculiar distortion of reality born from pursuing an illusion to the point of madness and absurdity. The past is never simply the past; it is present in the here and now and largely determines the future. The delusion that we can easily rid ourselves of past vices is the most direct path to their return, again and again. The utopia of totalitarian regimes, which all resemble each other and give rise to one another, is precisely linked to the lie that human nature can be easily trained to serve unreservedly some "noble idea." Whoever does not submit to this goal does not deserve to live. But life is much richer, much deeper. Man is a difficult puzzle to decipher. Very often his manifestations are disappointing, and salvation from his own shortcomings seems unattainable. That is why savior-dictators have solved the problem by destroying "problematic" people. But the truth is that there are no non-problematic ones... The salvation we offer in theater is purifying laughter. Stoyan Radev