BREMEN taz (review from 28.03.2015)| The dreaded fact and narcissistic insult that it is determined without consultation with us when we have reached the natural end of all existence, its goal, death: For those who are not sick or old and tired of life, the moment usually comes too soon – when the Grim Reaper ingratiates himself as the brother of sleep to cut the ribbon of life. Will everything be worse or much nicer than on earth afterwards – or will there be nothing at all? All that is uncertain. The Stadttheater Bremerhaven now takes up these questions on a cruise to the last things.

The “HadesTour” begins in the here and now: the documentary theatre makers have researched that the fears surrounding death can easily be alleviated if it is organized during one’s lifetime what happens to one’s bodily remains: for example, a home tour into the element from which all life once emerged. “Burial at sea is now permitted for everyone in Germany and is booming,” says dramaturge Karin Nissen-Rizvani. “We were therefore hardly able to rehearse at our venue”, the ‘MS Geestemünde’.

Because when she is not sailing tourists on the Outer Weser for the Dicke-Pötte tour, the maritime events agency offers “a dignified setting” for a nautical funeral on the thirty-and-a-half-metre-long boat. With the flag at half-mast and the decorated ashes amphora in the saloon, the boat heads to the burial site off Wremen. The sea urn is placed in the water to the sound of eight glasses of the ship’s bell. Its salt crystals dissolve within a few hours, allowing the ashes to float out into the open and mix with the North Sea sand.

The expanse of the horizon, the undulating sea, the rushing calm and the knowledge that you won’t be bothered by cemetery and grave care bills. Such a public ceremony of farewell brightens the mood and allows for a state of serene relief, says the dramaturge. And this is also how the “HadesTour” should work. “It is an invitation to approach the taboo subjects of dying and death, to deal with them openly in order to become more relaxed.”

The performers frame the evening on board with Ovid’s Orpheus saga. As a participating observer, the audience first pays the helmsman Charon. Then it’s down the Styx, popularly known as the Weser, to the limit of all limits, Hades. The North Sea?

In 2011, ethnologist Hans Peter Duerr claimed to have found a Minoan seal near Pellworm and concluded that the Minoans had undertaken a “journey beyond” to the North Sea in the late 15th, early 14th century. And the object artist Hannsjörg Voth identified the shelf sea with Hades, rafting a 20-metre-long mummy down the Rhine to Rotterdam in 1978 – and letting it drift away into the realm of the dead.

For the Bremerhaven theater art action, you can now sit safely in the “Prussia” room of the death cutter, which Oliver Gather “has designed as a room installation with images of remembrance”, says Nissen-Rizvani. A loudspeaker will be used to play the original sounds of a mortician couple, a pastor and a nurse from a palliative care unit. A hospice choir will also be heard – with the last words of doomed patients: “I only ask that it goes quickly. You give a dog an injection when it can no longer be cured, but you let a person hang on.”

This is accompanied by literary finds such as excerpts from Wolfgang Herrndorf’s diary about his cancer. A kind of plea for suicide: “I must know that I am master in my own house; that I am master in my own house. Nothing more.” The author angrily asks why the suicide weapon is not paid for by health insurance: “Globules yes, bazooka no. Morons.”

Is dealing with the inevitable depressing? “No,” says the theater maker, “it opens up opportunities to compare what is said with one’s own experiences of death, and the sensitivity in dealing with the topic grows.” The evening also takes up conciliatory ideas. Montaigne’s thesis, for example, that philosophizing means learning to die: “Your death is a piece of the order of the universe, it is a piece of the life of the world.”

But don’t we know with Epicurus that death is also nothing for us? If we are alive, it is not there, “and if it is there, we are no more”. Is it even possible to talk about it, to make a fuss? “No,” says Nissen-Rizvani. That’s why “MS Geestemünde” doesn’t steer past the hellhound Kerberos: “We avoid crossing the border,” says Nissen-Rizvani, “forgoing the esotericism of near-death experiences and the cultural-historical view of the afterlife.”

Instead, the focus is on the search for points of contact between life and death for the dying and their relatives – and the questions of meaning that arise from this. In the spirit of good old Sartrean existentialism, to open up the freedom to accept the time of life in a more self-determined way.