In the end, you want to run onto the stage. Admire the artfully dismantled carriage, on which a wheel still turns, a lamp flickers tentatively, scraps of paper whirl around. A fan lies on the seat, next to it a pistol – no trace of its owners. Only one horse can be seen, trapped between the rubble.

It is said to be the carriage of Heinrich von Kleist, who, according to his own description, narrowly escaped death in Butzbach in 1801: A donkey had broken out into "horrible screaming" – the horses of the carriage had lifted "straight up into the air". "So a human life hung on a donkey scream?", Kleist writes anxiously and thus becomes the loose leitmotif for the play of the Berlin theatre collective "copy & waste" in Ballhaus Ost. "Bye, bye, bye", they say, and everything revolves around death and dying.

A donkey screams

Only one actor is on stage that evening: Hannes Schumacher, who explains as a production assistant in front of the curtain that tonight's theatre evening cannot take place. The ensemble had an accident when they wanted to bring a carriage from Kleist's time here, in Butzbach, where the horses went crazy after a donkey screamed. From a standing start, Schumacher succeeds in attuning the audience to the sometimes cheerful-morbid, sometimes melancholic-aestheticized atmosphere of the piece. He smoothly changes his roles: from a production assistant, who is only too happy to be on stage, to a sympathetic performer of a wide variety of death texts. From Kleist's farewell letters to Dostoyevsky's account of his mock execution.

Amusingly over-the-top

Again and again Schumacher approaches the curtain, strokes its folds as if casually. As if behind it hides the solution of the old riddle of how to face death correctly. But the curtain remains down – instead, "Copy & Waste" now looks back on half of Western cultural history via video projections: Hannes Schumacher can be seen in the re-enactment of classical paintings, as the protagonist in the "Earthquake in Chili", in amusingly exaggerated television formats or as the bad-tempered ferryman Charon on a motorboat. Mostly blue or sepia, with a shaky camera that gets lost in detail shots, image noise and transitions to an atmospheric soundtrack. Meanwhile, medieval texts alternate with quotations from Handke and Hölderlin, and again and again it is stated in shimmering silent film aesthetics and laconic computer game dramaturgy: "You're dead". A morbid Panini album for educated citizens with a penchant for pop culture.

Never-ending showreel

Basically, the production knows nothing about real death and dying, about suffering, despair and grief. But it doesn't pretend either. The opening monologue was too funny for that, the trash aesthetic seems too exuberant. Rather, "copy & waste" develops its own pictorial language, which works because it keeps enough of oppressive seriousness and just the right distance to kitschy death romanticism. Only towards the end it all gets a bit too much, and you think you are trapped in a never-ending showreel of the main character.

When the curtain finally rises and a real stage design can now be seen for the first time with the carriage, one hopes that Hannes Schumacher will end the play as furiously as he began it. Instead, it's over right away. One would have liked to see more of the theatre, more of the stage design, for which Hsuan Huang and Hsiangfu Chen are responsible. So you have no choice but to take another close look at the magnificent pile of rubble.