"Rent" is a modern version of Puccini's opera "La Bohème" and is set in New York's artsy East Village neighbourhood. Seven young people take centre stage, including a gay and a lesbian couple and the transvestite Angel. They confront social problems with love and creativity.
The play is entitled "Rent" because two young artists can no longer pay their expensive rent. Their landlord is, of all people, their former flatmate.
Aids is another central theme of the musical. Author Jonathan Larson was very much under the influence of the AIDS crisis when he wrote the play in the 1990s. Many of his friends died during this time. The highly effective combination therapies against HIV did not yet exist at that time; they have only been available since the mid-nineties.
Larson wanted to counter the real-life drama with a positive message: "The aim is to avoid the already clichéd stereotype of the 'Aids victim' and emphasise that a) people with Aids can lead a full life and b) Aids affects everyone - not just homosexuals and drug addicts, c) in our desensitised society, those struggling for life and death often live more intensely than members of the so-called 'mainstream'".
The message was obviously well received: "Rent" won the Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize. By 2008, it had played 5,123 performances on Broadway, the seventh longest run of a Broadway musical of all time. The new production at the Deutsches Theater also met with a largely positive response after its premiere on 9 April.
But is the musical still relevant in 2010? After all, HIV has far less dramatic consequences today than it did in 1995. Director Stefan Huber finds the core message of the play timeless: "We have learnt to live with this disease. But who tells us that an epidemic like this can't come back? It's about the threat to life, in the case of AIDS especially in connection with love. Over the centuries, there have always been social conditions like this, whether it was wars or other threats. They make us reflect on our own lives."
