An advertiser conquers the stage

People Time is moving faster and faster: whereas it used to take an entire life's work and a few years of "rest in peace" for a character to be considered historical and perhaps immortalized in a drama, today a few months of headlines and a logo are enough for a character to be ready for the stage. "That's Tyler Brûlé," murmured everyone in the audience as a young guy with an unmistakable advertising hairstyle wandered through Christoph Marthaler's latest play last Saturday. At the Zurich Schauspielhaus, the Brûlé parody was allowed to mime an art director and explain in a presentation at the heavily applauded revue "Groundings" why he would prefer to put up posters with nothing but a gray surface as advertising for Swiss. To this end, the stage brûle twitched in a very peculiar way several times and, with the help of a stage trick, vomited three times on the boards that, as we all know, mean the world. "He's doing coke," murmured the audience. But the program booklet reassured them: "Any resemblance to similar characters is purely coincidental."