Thought-Provoking Crime Drama And Star Vehicle: “Nebenan” At The Renaissance Theater, Berlin

The play Nebenan was premiered at Burgtheater Wien in 2022, based on the film of the same title (international title: Next Door) by Daniel Brühl (2021) in a production directed by the then head of the theatre, Martin Kušej. It starred Florian Teichtmeister and Norman Hacker. The production was dropped after Teichtmeister had been arrested for, had admitted to, and was later sentenced for, possession of child pornography images and videos. In 2023, a new production was first shown in Hamburg’s St Pauli Theater, with Oliver Mommsen and Stephan Grossmann. The Hamburg production has been taken up in the repertory of the Berlin Renaissance Theater.

The film and the play focus on two main characters, Daniel, a charismatic star actor and Bruno, his neighbour in the flat opposite, who works in the call centre of a bank. Before travelling to the casting of a major film role, Daniel kills some time in a local pub. Bruno introduces himself to Daniel initially as a naïve fan; in the course of their conversation, however, Bruno reveals more and more detailed knowledge about the lives of Daniel and his wife, Clara, including secrets they had kept from each other and the public. Bruno has accumulated this information slowly, deliberately and meticulously to take revenge on Daniel as the accessible representative of the benefits of German unification and the gentrification of the Berlin district they live in, Prenzlauer Berg. He is not interested in blackmail or money to stop; instead, he explicitly wants to destroy Daniel.

Since his breakthrough with his fifth novel in 2003, Daniel Kehlmann (b. 1975) has been a major figure in German intellectual life as a writer of prose fiction. He has also written five plays, translated three plays from English, and written several scripts for radio and film and TV. He is regularly invited to deliver keynote lectures and has received numerous awards for his work. Nebenan is written throughout in stylish, erudite German; it is intellectually stimulating and thought-provoking. The social environment of the pub is well captured by the characters of the landlady and a regular punter, who become integral to the plot. Kehlmann has thus been successful in combining the entertainment value of the popular crime drama genre with biting critique of society. In its brevity of 90 minutes duration without interval, the play comes across as a topical and condensed George Bernard Shaw.

The play also serves as a vehicle for star performers, often well-known from film and especially TV. Oliver Mommsen (b. 1969) played Daniel. He is well-known to German TV audiences, predominantly as one of the team of two police detectives in the north German city of Bremen in 34 episodes (from 2001-2019) of the series Tatort (to date 1315 90-minute episodes since 1970), as well as film and theatre. He was very convincing as the star actor, foregrounding nuances of the character’s star persona and the slow and steady deterioration of his composure as the depth of Bruno’s knowledge about his private life becomes increasingly and threateningly clear. The combination of Kehlmann’s text, Mommsen’s acting and the directorial input of Ulrich Waller ensure that this deterioration is handled with careful attention to detail: it remains cogent and gradual, never succumbing to the trap of starting at such a high level of intensity that any increase comes across as chaotic and reduces the actor to shouting.

Stephan Grossmann has a similarly distinguished profile on screen and stage. He is often, and successfully, cast as characters who seem inconspicuous at first, but who turn out to be creepily dangerous, in the sense of “still waters run deep”. His Bruno is one such character: at first apparently a naïve fan of the great actor, Daniel, but then developing gradually into a massive threat. Grossmann’s physicality is striking in this context: at first, he is a big, bumbling man with slow, awkward movements and a very soft, quite high-pitched voice to convey the awe he pretends to feel towards Daniel. His body becomes much more agile, and in the process much more menacing, and in line with that, the voice becomes authoritative, deep and controlling when he reveals more and more of the knowledge he has accumulated about Daniel.