BIG 3 (Happy/End)

Happiness and marketing

The final part of the BIG trilogy of plays by the Austrian-French theatre company Superamas comprises a whole string of clichés and smooth advertising images about success and happiness. At first sight everything looks perfect: the show is smooth and entertaining, the women are beautiful, healthy and sexy and the men are a little mean and cynical. However, it soon becomes apparent that there are hitches everywhere: scenes fall silent or are repeated, conversations slip away out of their context, and advertising images and philosophical reflections interrupt what is happening on stage.

This dramaturgical deconstruction is Superamas’ clever way of sharply cutting through the banality and predictability of our desires and expectations. Our ideas about happiness and success are larded with clichéd images and patterns created by the market. Ultimately, even our most intimate desires have already been calculated by statistics and marketing. Superamas make us realise that individual behaviour can be nothing more than a copy or a cliché. Without the hope that anyone can escape the commercial patterns of showbiz and the capitalist system, Superamas happily wallows in a mad mixture of advertisements, pop songs, soap scenes and semi-serious questions of life and death.