Berlin theatre has been eclipsed in the last few days by one spectacular event – gigantic in scale, yet curiously intimate. Royal de Luxe, the French company that turns whole cities into stages, was commissioned by the Berliner Festspiele to kick off its Spielzeit Europa season, which anticipates next month's 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and celebrates the reunification of Germany. It's a great programme including work by Robert Lepage, Michael Clark, Pina Bausch and her best heir Sasha Waltz, with Royal de Luxe concocting one of its idiosyncratic fairytales, The Berlin Reunion – A Giant's Tale.
In RDL's imagined world, a city has been torn apart and walled in. A young girl and a man have been separated. But the man has a cunning plan: he dives deep into the river and places a dormant geyser under the dividing wall. When it bursts forth, it carries the wall with it, and the two begin their journey to reunion. Just one surprise (at least if you haven't come across Royal de Luxe before): the young girl was played by a 5.5-metre marionette and controlled by 22 wire-pulling operatives called Lilliputians wearing red frock coats, in homage to Gulliver's Travels.
Travelling with the girl was a mailbag stuffed with 90,000 replicas of letters and postcards intercepted or confiscated by the Stasi, East Germany's notorious secret police – letters that were made public after the fall of the wall. She wandered from Alexanderplatz to Potsdamer Platz and through Checkpoint Charlie, briefly pausing to rest on the spot where Goebbels and the brownshirts made a bonfire of books. Her partner rose up out of the water in a full atmospheric diving suit, 10-metre tall and weighing two tonnes – only a few metres from the spot where 24-year-old Günter Litfin was shot in 1961 as he tried to swim to the free west.
The couple's delicate movements and gestures, their fluttering eyelashes, their emotional embrace, created a fairytale out of what had been a nightmare. The climax of the show – a reunion at the Brandenburg Gate capped by a scattering of the confiscated letters – made us more than an audience. We became players in an extraordinary event.
Here, where the scars of Germany's dysfunctional past are so clearly visible – the scrawled Soviet graffiti on the Reichstag walls from 1945, the buildings wounded with shrapnel marks, the traces of the once-divided city now marked out by different streetlamps and traffic lights – this piece of theatre gave the community of the healed capital the permission to come out and play. It's amazing what puppets can do.
