D: Kurdwin Ayub
One could worry that a play set in 2666 about a female caliph who fucks and then kills a new (and disenfranchised) white man every night before feeding their penises to a giant spider might play into an AfD fever-dream of what Berlin theatre is like. Of course, the Kurdish-Austrian director Kurdwin Ayub is acutely aware of her audience’s reactions to her theatre debut.
It’s both a wider power struggle between white Christian men and Muslim women and a more personal one across generations, between a coarse, hedonistic mother (the charismatic Neukölln rapper addeN) who sees empowerment as the right to comport herself in the same manner as her abusive deceased husband, and her daughter (a thoroughly convincing Samirah Breuer), who wants female power to mean something new and more enlightened.
And yet, to elucidate the play’s themes is to reduce the strangeness and hilarity of this spectacle, which involves breakdanced revolutions, an enormous animatronic spider and latex bodysuits. The estrangement, though, is not only spectacular but substantive, building toward the moment before a second revolution occurs, when a conversation reveals the play’s core concern: Who will a white society accept as a representative Muslim figure – not too threatening, but also seemingly authentic?
While this is often a demand placed on the minoritised artist, as this work of comedic rage makes clear, it shouldn’t be a Muslim queen or a Kurdish-Austrian filmmaker who has to worry about how she might be received. Instead, this “erotic-adventure-horror drama with trash elements” indicts an European society that needs to reflect on its own intolerant stereotypes.
- Weiße Witwe, Volksbühne, Linienstr. 227, Mitte, German with English surtitles, May 29 and June 17, details.
