The Captain of Köpenick is now a ubiquitous icon in the district of south-eastern Berlin which gave him his name. Every street has a shop or bar named after him, his moustachioed face twinkles out from dozens of locations. I’ve even seen him pressed into service to protest against residents’ parking charges imposed by the borough… which is rather appropriate, since he made his name in 1906 by impersonating a military officer and “confiscating” the local treasury.

Carl Zuckmayer’s 1931 play eschews the confected roguishness and Robin Hoodery to explain what led Wilhelm Voigt to this pass, namely decades of falling prey to a legislative Catch-22 whereby he could not get a job without a residency permit nor vice versa. The German fetish of the time for obeying authority is satirised, but principally it is a social indictment.

The balance struck by Zuckmayer, however, is overturned in Jan Bosse and David Heiligers’ adaptation at the Deutsches Theater. This is a very talky production. Bosse’s principal alternatives to characters standing and talking are to have them either sitting and talking or standing and shouting. Quite often the eight actors seem to move less than Stéphane Laimé’s set of flats and blocks which mostly carry photographs of modern architecture. Superimposed on these are projections of live action when a revolving stage means we can’t always see it in the flesh, and advertising images for the likes of Yves Saint Laurent and Dior. Couture is important: much implicit play is made of the “clothes make the man” trope, with characters wearing shirts that reproduce backdrop images or glittery quilted jackets. The captain’s uniform itself (whose convergence with Voigt takes over two hours of playing time, with barely fifteen minutes then given to the escapade itself) has not one square millimetre that is sequin-free. But it never seems to amount to anything.

Milan Peschel’s Voigt (he is the only actor who does not take multiple roles) is consistently down-at-heel, from the opening moments when a door upstage refuses to open for him until the end when he is likewise cut off by the safety curtain. But this version of the play never allows him to engage us: it’s one of those instances where the righteousness of the telling-off takes ill-advised precedence over the subject itself.

Written for the Financial Times.