Idea: Peter Müller

Written by: Produktion Team

Story: Hans Fallada

Director: Markus Joss

Actors: Peter Müller, Pierre Schäfer

Scenery: Christian Werdin

Sound: Peter Müller

Light: Peter Müller

Duration

The duration of each performance is 70 minutes. Ist possible to play two performances for one day.

It must be about 2 hours between the performances.

Company name

Theater Handgemenge (Germany)

What does this mean?

The word 'Handgemenge' directly translated means Scuffle or Mélee. We chose this as our name because when we started out we were 5 Puppetmasters who played together in a small, 2x2 m., puppet theater. Because of the smallness of the room, and all the hands, things sometimes got 'out of hand' and turned into quite a scuffle!

The 'Theater Handgemenge' is an independent theater group consisting of graduates of the acting school Ernst Busch in Berlin (1986-1990) which produces several shows with various casts. The theater group was founded in 1990. We work together mainly with Berlin theaters, other independent theater groups and solo artists. With these shows, we do guest performances and take part in national and international festivals.

Show name 

What is it?  I have seen several!

The name of this particular production is not easy to translate because "Höchste Eisenbahn" is a German word game that means: The time is ripe to take quick action". The train is fast, the Höchste Eisenbahn is therefore very fast! At the same time, it means that the train is the greatest and most  important! The following translations can be used: "Running on Time", "Lords of the Railway", "Train Mad", "Well Trained".

Age suitability

6+, Families and adults

Picture Galerie from the performance (not for Print)

please conatct me. I send photos by mail for print  Mail

Announcement (from Edinburgh)

Lords of the Railway

Uwe and Dirk are model railway enthusiasts and hopeless perfectionists.

As they potter around their miniature world, one of them tells a story about a little boy who loses his toy dog on the train. Slowly the story takes over as the train. heads for Warsaw and the boy`s father goes in hot pursuit.

With the help of a real miniature train set, Germany`s Theater handgemenge presents a virtuoso piece of fast-paced story-telling theatre. Brilliantly performed, it is dramatic, quirky an great fun.

Reviews (from Edinburgh)

THEATRE

 **** LORDS OF THE RAILWAY

 CHILDREN'S INTERNATIONAL THEATRE FESTIVAL EDINBURGH

 ..……..For a conceptdriven show that works like a dream, though, audiences in Edinburgh until tomorrow, and at the Thron until Saturday, should beg, borrow or steal a ticket for the fabulous Lords of the Railway from Germany's Theater Handgemenge. This is a show in which two grown men play for 70 minutes with one of the most beautiful trainsets you'll ever see. It somehow also tells us more than we would have thought possible about boyhood, manhood and male friendship, and about the fatherly love that transforms lives and changes perspectives for ever. JOYCE McMILLAN

festival “Augenblickmal Berlin”

Two men, Uwe and Dirk, love nothing more than to play with their model railways. „Stand back please! Mind the closing doors!“ And off the train goes. Each of them knows plenty of train stories. One starts like this: „Once there was a little boy named Thomas. He had a little stuffed dog named Hoppelpoppel. One day a tragedy occurred. Hoppelpoppel got lost on a train ride. Thomas was devastated. How can his father help him? He gets on a train and embarks on a journey...“

The audience experiences how Uwe and Dirk sink ever deeper into their self-created miniature world. They are playing. Playing, a key word in this production: it is everything that happens on the tracks, in the houses and in the story about Thomas and his „Hoppelpoppel“. A play with two actors, puppets and a genuine model railway embedded in a miniature landscape.

The Jury's Vote  festival “Augenblickmal Berlin”

A hobby is celebrated by two grown-up men, Dirk and Uwe, hopeless perfectionists. While their work on their model railway is subject to strict rituals, it should also be fun - providing everything stays under control! Yet every shift of the tracks can become a new test on their friendship. But they know each other so well now, and every train has its course.

This mixture of pedantry and roguish enjoyment is not foremost concerned with proximity to the audience. The characters are, at first, just the way they are: fuss pots and hobby room heroes. Yet with clockwork timing, the direction gives every gesture, every word such unexpected comical energy - yet never at the expense of the characters, on the contrary, it successively makes them more endearing.

Traffic is humming along, Uwe and Dirk are ready to start taking on passengers. Thomas rolls into the miniature train station, with Aunt Kunjä and Hoppelpoppel. But when they meet Thomas' father in his new house, Hoppelpoppel is suddenly missing! Forgotten in the train (by Dirk! or Uwe?). The train has already departed on its way towards Warsaw. Thomas will never be able to sleep again - without his Hoppelpoppel. The problem will have to be solved in Berlin. Father goes out to buy a new stuffed dog for his son.

The growing drama of their story propels the men into a virtuoso of the performing arts. Materials, humans and machines assert themselves as a complete cosmos of modern city life. With great craftsmanship, and apparent effortlessness, Peter Müller and Pierre Schäfer are able to converge dramatic puppetry, material animation and commentary into fast-paced storytelling theatre, which still carefully leaves room for the participatory experience of the audience.

At the highpoint of the „action“, Uwe breaks one of the fundamental rules. When Hoppeldoppel is found after a long and hard search, instead of bringing him back to Thomas, the Uwe-father gives him to a child on the train who has grown attached to the little stuffed dog. „How are you going to explain that to Thomas!“ Dirk is irrate, Uwe is on the verge of tears. Just as the Uwe-father is approaching the little house where Thomas lives to break the sad news to him, a toot can be heard.

A train is coming in from the East. Dirk is back in the game... and out of the small tragedy comes great happiness, after all. The combination of the two performance levels has succeeded and the story is in its finale.

The fact that hobbies, especially those of men, tend to develop their own lives is nothing new, the basements of suburbia are teeming with parallel worlds and substitute lives. To explore one of these parallel worlds for what it has to tell us about our own lives - this opportunity has been taken full advantage of by this production.

Ina Kindler-Popp

GREEN LIGHT FOR TINKERS

“Lords of the Railway

(from a Potsdam News Review)

It's pretty obvious when you see Dirk and Uwe that they haven't left their hobby room for quite some time. With their buttoned-up-to-the-neck collars, woolen sweater-vests and house coats made of nylon and imitation leather, they show a sort of timeless disinterest in their own appearance. But Dirk and Uwe don't want to be seen; they want to build... and tinker! And they do it on their own little private island, their „Island in the Sun“ as Harry Belafonte confirms on cassette.

These gentlemen are interested in neither palm trees nor the gentle sound of lapping waves, no! Their yearning is for signalling systems, guarded crossings, new tunnels. Dirk and Uwe are model train enthusiasts of the finest. Everything is at hand on this gigantic train set:  straight tracks, curves, a downhill loop, a railway bridge, train stations, bucolic countryside with cows, and just about everything a model train enthusiast's heart desires. (Stage design and costumes by Christian Werdin). Peter Mueller (Uwe) and Pierre Schaefer (Dirk) from Theater Punch-Up (Theater Handgemenge) in Berlin, either had passionate hobby-fathers and inherited the whole lot or had a very intricate look into many an unfamiliar hobby room. Appearance, gesture, facial expression: the two of them know from the

get-go just what goes on atop their cloud of rapture. With enchanted reverence, they steal upon the pieces of the model train, still resting in their wrappers, and reveal each piece, one at a time, with the utmost care. It goes with the territory that one should secretly spy on the other in case - oh heavens! - the grazing cow should be put in the wrong corner. Real tinkers are perfectionists. And finally... the lights are flashing, the rivalries over, and two street cars roll away from Station Springpfuhl and cruise a few rounds. The tinkers and their audience are joyous! But the big surprise has been hiding in its box: A black steam engine and railway cars!

With a few hand movements, the route to Warsau is set up with variable station houses, in between a sip of coffee for the players out of Mitropa mugs. (and on the countryside, a little house for Thomas' parents) That's how Dirk and Uwe weave their way, wonderfully and quirky-quaint, into the Hans Fallada story of the stuffed dog ‚Hoppelpoppel' and his idle train ride. It all goes from big to small in a non-stop exchange and back again. For example, we're shown how the stuffed dog, in his original size, stumbles across  over the railway bridge.

Staying „true to scale“, as the tinkers stress over and over, the tiny ‚Hoppelpoppel' is put into one of the train cars with the help of tweezers. Father, Mother, Aunt Kunjae and Thomas can be seen as dolls on the platform. Maybe a little small from the last rows in a riding arena but up front, surely a much better view.

Word games and innuendo, of which Mueller and Schaefer have plenty of, are great fun for the adults. The six-year-olds, for which the piece is made, are pleased by the visible goings-on and the stuffed dog with the clumsy name. But then, as the Father in ‚real size' - played by Peter Mueller - gives away the newly, and under very difficult circumstances acquired ‚Hoppelpoppel', Thomas is inconsolable. This gives way to a highly dramatic conflict that pulls at the strings of the child's heart in every adult. And even though the father - back in ‚small size' - lays himself briefly on the tracks after realizing the impact of his deed, things turn out in the end for the very best. This odd little hour is warmly reccomended. CAROLIN LORENZ

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