“Bullenstress”, a kind of lesson in the “box” in shipbuilding, is about discrimination. The material sticks to clichés. However, the evening benefits from the committed young performers.
Despite the crisis, the band tries to stick together (Flynn Jost, Pauline Avognon, Fayrouz Gabriel).
At first they have it so good together, the three girlfriends and two boyfriends, that one could become jealous. They come from middle-class or bourgeois backgrounds. Despite their different origins and skin color, they get along very well; well, the only one from Basel is a bit more out of line linguistically.
So they lead a seemingly carefree life that mostly revolves around the music they create together. The band meets in the studio, where Astro distinguishes herself as a sound inventor, Ella is the singer, Nabil is responsible for the lyrics, Mari for the outfit and Damn probably for the management.
harsh reality
The stage (Moïra Gilliéron) is dominated by a large wall; Lined with foam structures, it is reminiscent of the damping in recording studios. In the ship’s box, it may symbolize the seclusion of the crew. This actually seems largely immune to professional or social fears, drugs, violence. In any case, it’s never mentioned. A little love frustration has to be. Otherwise, however, the energies flow into the new songs, which, of all people, are judged by the parents.
It’s the police’s fault that harsh reality suddenly breaks out into this perfect world. Ella’s brother, dark-skinned like herself, observed at the train station how the police checked an entire migrant family and intervened with a few questions. So it came to a scuffle; the youth ended up at the post where he was apparently beaten and racially insulted.
Ella and her friends are outraged by the “cops”. Although the surprise shouldn’t be too great, the prejudice against the police seems cemented. “A cop is a cop is a cop,” prays Mari. The B-word then falls into “bull stress” so often that one wonders why the insulting generalization didn’t occur to these five smart youngsters at some point. Especially since, as will be shown, they are otherwise quite sensitive to discrimination.
But hey, it’s okay! Firstly, puberty and post-puberty just speak that language, secondly, in the case of her brother, these bulls were really evil, as Ella can lead her to believe. The authors of “Bullenstress”, Fatima Moumouni and Laurin Buser, still have to put up with the accusation that their play was based on a stereotype – including a clear allocation of roles between good and evil. And even if police attacks are sometimes real, the simplicity of the material turns into a cliché.
A rumbling underground
Thanks to the fast-paced staging (Suna Gürler) and the committed acting of the young crew (Pauline Avognon, Moubarak Djibri, Fayrouz Gabriel, Samira Graf, Flynn Jost), one can at least understand how the racist incident developed into a rift. For Ella, racism becomes an “idée fixe” and a kind of mania. The band members suddenly seem too cowardly, too indecisive and, in the case of Damn, too «white».
Dogged and bitter, she researches further racist misconduct by the police – her friends mockingly speak of “cop porn”. Ultimately, Ella considers the fact that no one really takes a stand against racism and the police to be typically Swiss: problems are hypocritically overlooked; underground, however, the repressed rumbles. Is that correct? You’ve heard and read something like this so often that you don’t quite know: Are Moumouni/Buser hitting a sore spot with this? Or just a commonplace?