Walter Bockmayer

Bockmayer’s Carmen – an absurd melodrama about a prostitute working without a pimp and having the men at her feet – is a sweeping blow against the societal norms concerning beauty and skinniness of the sterile fitness and advertisement aesthetic. In this play, the racy senorita is a ribald prostitute from the Klapperhof in Cologne’s red light district. Her suitor, Don José, mutates into a local cop and Escamillo, a Torero in the original, now courts Carmen’s temperamental affections at Cologne’s Hohenzollernring as football idol Toni Schuhmacher. Bockmayer also stirs things up musically with foreign Schlager music and musical hits. The cigarette factory workers are now bitchy alley cats, chattering and cooing, rocking and rolling. Legs are being thrown into the air, Tutti Frutti in the backyards. Between travesty and trallala, farce and tragicomedy, clap-along-march and play-along-quatsch, plebeic wit can be seen in a mixture of sensibility and tackiness that can be found in no other city.