Glossy words
In the world premiere of “The Black Stone”, the Theater 'Dasvinzenz' takes apart the platitudes of advertising language.
This clip struck a nerve. At the end of 2021, the Penny supermarket chain released a short film in which mother and son meet at the kitchen table at night and he asks her: “Mom, what do you want for Christmas?” Mom wants a normal teenage life for her boy, which we see unfold in small, emotionally charged scenes.
It should be like before the pandemic. The video has now been clicked more than 17 million times on YouTube. Nevertheless, if you only listen to the few sentences that are spoken, it's hard to ignore their paucity. From a linguistic point of view: minimum effort, maximum effect.
Theater Dasvinzenz is now taking this not entirely surprising principle of advertising apart in its world premiere “Der schwarze Stein”. Cornelia Maschner devised the evening and staged it in the alternative venue Mucca. The director has a knack for turning things into the absurd. She demonstrated this, for example, with her stream “Retnecboj”, which was created during lockdown. Back then it was about social grievances, now it's about advertising and influencers. To do this, she filtered the most successful campaigns of the past 30 years - including Penny's - and wrote their slogans into her textbook. This has the astonishing effect that nothing worth mentioning actually happens in terms of content, but the recognition value of the sentence snippets is enormously high.
The whole evening is over the top. The six actors (Monika Maria Herzing, Almut Kohnle, Martina Kundinger, Victor Natus, Marie Scholz and Janina Voss) are close to the audience, crossing the room on catwalks, rattling off advertising slogans, playing influencers, loud, fast, hyper. They function like glossy advertisements that always have to get close to the viewer. You can't expect depth of character or stringency in the plot, it's all about nonsense. Gain in knowledge? A small cake instead of many words.