Mr. Baron arrives barefoot and pays with a button
A cold comedy with music
BARON: I smuggle my true thoughts into the office every morning and out again in the afternoons. So far I haven't been caught, but I'm afraid it won't last much longer. I can hardly hide them anymore—they're pouring out of me everywhere.
Characters
Joseph von E. – Baron and poet
Marie – an innkeeper
ACTION
Somewhere near Berlin around 1830. A wet man, in tattered clothes and without shoes, appears at night in the tavern of a small town.
He seems disoriented and is talking incoherently.
The jaded, man-weary landlady initially takes him for just another one of those crazy vagrants she's already had to send enough of out of her tavern. She's about to brusquely send him back out onto the street when she suddenly stops short: this man is saying things that deeply move her and stand in stark contrast to the daily babble of the drunks around her. And—this voice has spoken to her before—long ago—in a past that now hovers around her like a beautiful fairytale image.
Gradually, in this nocturnal piece, the two find each other, freeing each other from prisons that had initially been their hiding places, into which they had retreated, insulted and timidated by the world.
In the end, it's really supposed to be the end for him - but then a simple woman has something important to say.
REVIEWS
How can one live rationally in a world full of malice and cruelty? In the play "Herr Baron kommt barefoot und bezahlt mit einem Knopf" (Mr. Baron Comes Barefoot and Pays with a Button), a simple innkeeper helps a poet find a possible answer.
A clever piece, dealing with the tragedy of being human, unpretentiously executed.
(Jasmina Puchala – “dziennik teatralny”)