Grips-Theater
[1] It has gained a national and international reputation, not least due to its former artistic director Volker Ludwig's musicals for adults, such as its evergreen Linie 1, Café Mitte or the adaptation of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
[2] In 1966, a children's theatre was formed at the Berlin Reichskabarett, "a student group that created programs and satirical sketches interspersed with topical songs".
[3] Volker Ludwig [de], who would go on to serve as the GRIPS-Theatre's artistic director for nearly four decades, was one of the authors and co-founders of the group, which defined itself as part of the Außerparlamentarische Opposition (German for extra-parliamentary opposition), a political protest movement in West Germany during the latter half of the 1960s and early 1970s, which formed a central part of the German student movement.
In the summer of 1966, the group began performing plays for children on weekends, starting with the satirically reworked fairy tale The Devil with the Three Golden Hairs.
It features a girl protagonist, named Millipilli, who travels to a far-away island to save Santa Claus's tree, which wilts away after being neglected by the adults.
A recurring topic were gender roles, including the then-typical path of girls becoming housewives instead of pursuing a career, and in the 1970s, the troupe developed more and more plays dealing with that subject.
Whereas in West Berlin, the municipal government recommended it for elementary school classes despite harsh criticism from conservatives, "Bavarian teachers were not allowed to attend the play with their children".
Volker Ludwig is quoted as saying, "[Grips is] not to give up, always have faith in that last grain of common sense, and – hardest of all – try and develop some kind of positive outlook.
The building was designed by German architects Ernst Zinsser and Hansrudi Plarre as part of the Interbau housing development, constructed for the International Architecture Exhibition in 1957.
(Das hältste ja im Kopf nicht aus), it dealt with problems faced by general school students.
The Berlin chapter of the Christian Democrat Party, then in opposition, labelled the actors as communists who would corrupt children and claimed that the youth play's "unwholesome language" incited young people to acts of violence.
In May 1975, the town councillor for youth in Berlin's Steglitz district, Klaus Dieter Friedrich, banned a guest performance of Mensch Mädchen!
Journalists of the powerful Springer publishing house, which controls the largest share of the German market for daily newspapers, also attacked the theatre.
The Berliner Morgenpost wrote that GRIPS' plays were rearing "a load of political psychopaths, poor devils who would one day be their own destruction, having destroyed other things on the way".
For three years, they forced its parliamentary group to vote in favour of withholding funds from Grips and not allowing school classes to visit us.
A Story of the Left (Eine linke Geschichte), performed at the GRIPS to this day, deals with three students who meet in 1966 at a rally against the American War in Vietnam.
The music was written by German musician and composer Birger Heymann [de], a longtime friend of Ludwig, and the rock band No Ticket (Thomas Keller, George Kranz, Axel Kottmann, Michael Brandt, Richard Wester, Matthias Witting).
The story follows a young woman who runs away from her provincial hometown and ends up at Berlin's notorious Zoo station, searching for a rock musician who got her pregnant on a one-night stand.
According to the GRIPS, "it's a show, a drama, a musical about living and surviving in a large city, hope and adaptation, courage and self-deceit, to laugh and cry at, to dream, and to think about oneself.
For years, Linie 1 was the most-played German production and it remains the second-most successful musical after Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera.
[9][10] After learning about this, members of the GRIPS, translated his song Morning Dew into German, visited South Korea in 2004, and gave it to him as a gift.
When Volker Ludwig left his post as the GRIPS' artistic director at the end of the 2011/2012 season, he appointed Stefan Fischer-Fels as his successor who had previously worked at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus.
"[14] Several of the GRIPS-Theatre's cast have gone on to successful careers in TV and film, including Dieter Landuris, Petra Zieser, Heinz Hoenig, Axel Prahl, Julia Blankenburg, Nadine Warmuth, and Mathias Schlung.
