Don’t be yourself

“Since we have seen that even the most authentic real-people-theatre works with the art of pretence, ‘Be yourself’ is a thing of the past. ‘Don't be yourself’ is the logical title of a project by Basel theatre-maker Boris Nikitin in which five actors lay out their lives in front of the audience. They do this quite simply. They line up chairs, sit down and talk in turns according to the rules of allusion and anecdote. They insistently repeat their real names, touch on their origins, their childhood, their talents, fears and hopes. The motifs gradually intertwine, very carefully, very cleverly, and if the narrators were spiders, they would soon have their audience wrapped up. (...) The astonishing thing about this narrative strategy is that every biographical layer of revelation could just as well serve to conceal. (...) At the end, the ensemble swaps clothes. A clear hint: we don't know these people.”

“Slowly, and only gradually become noticeable, set pieces from the stories are repeated, they are arranged differently, slightly altered, supposed facts get mixed up. Some memoirs are heard three, even four times, from different mouths. The endless performative tension between repetition and difference has rarely been perceived with such precision. By the end, the actors will have swapped clothes and taken on the roles of the others. It looks grotesque when the beefy Thomas ‘Ich habe 115 Kilo’ Frank becomes the petite Katharina Klar (and vice versa), and is probably just as ‘real’ as the (too) sweet smell of ready meals from the Spartan stage kitchen that is already wafting through the room.Translated with DeepL.com (free version)”