What’s a Mob to a King: Plot Twist Redemption by Liina Magnea premiered at Sophiensæle Berlin, 12–15 June 2026, in the festival Never Work.
A musical and dance work with a scenography of Picasso reproductions, the work follows a power-hungry woman and two lost soldiers through an original song cycle that ponders and pokes at pro-militarisation propaganda, post-war myths of individual genius, and the lure of purpose and belonging. Magnea’s commanding presence and the young men‘s maligned aspiration become their own absurdist argument about what it takes to recruit and be recruited.
Alice:
Going deep into your material—songs, story, dance—with a small cast and untraditional arc, they seemed to become devices for influence and abstraction.
Liina:
I rest in the wide spectrum of references the audience brings. The dance stage is a great space for proximity. If I did this at Theater des Westens, people would ask: where’s the story? What’s the singing telling me?
I started by wanting to work with a male choir. That got too expensive, but the obsession with the form and emotionality stayed. Male choirs have such a sonic array. I realised: it’s enough to work with singing without the whole choir. Text in pop music is so manipulative. You can say “George W. Bush”, and people are swinging and singing along, and it takes a moment to process what you just heard.
Alice:
Hidden messages. We’re not always aware there’s a mechanism of control at work, like in the bridge you draw between love addiction and finding one’s purpose in the army: propaganda operating on vulnerable subjects, who in turn become fighting machines, the wicked ones; antagonists.
Liina:
I have a very personal relationship to this. I grew up with the message that you need to be able to defend yourself and the country. Finland has Russia as a neighbour. My dad produced war movies—co-produced with Russia, a lot in Estonia. Not propagating war, but there is a fetishism. Both my brothers loved airsoft battles, reenacting war, really good guns, and storming buildings.
Alice:
Realities, as well as fantasies. Governments need war to mean something, so people join their armies and, later, they might align with cultural production and rhetoric that laments these battles as tragic. And the arts take an anti-military stance for granted while celebrating branded individual genius: hypocrisy. Your work brought subtle awareness of these dynamics through absurdity.
Liina:
I think it’s genius in an artwork if you find yourself moved rather than provoked. I can achieve that by being self-reflective and recognising my own hypocrisy: being against war and wanting to believe there is an alternative, but asking myself if that’s delusional. Or, is it delusional to think that war is the only option?
Alice:
There’s so much anti-war art—Marlene Dietrich, Yoko Ono, Brecht… What’s rare is going into the cosplay of something while consciously performing it—you as the Diplomat’s Wife, Noah Rees and Konstantin Wloch as lost, impressionable soldiers, under your spell.
Liina:
Chaplin was doing Hitler imitations before World War II. And already in the 1930s, in Weimar cabaret culture, they were making fun of him. People were agreeing that he was a fool before the war.
© Mayra Wallraff
Alice:
Chaplin self-produced, because Hollywood was scared of angering Germany… Your work sits between different time periods and art forms. Contemporary dance has long rejected narrative; working with character and text feels both transgressive and a return to earlier histories.
Liina:
I was collaborating with visual artists (including Astrid K. Nylander, who designed the set and lighting) who don’t need a logical narrative. But working with collective time in the theatre is a specific frame for experience. The Sophiensæle dramaturgs helped us develop the dramaturgical arc in the final stages.
Alice:
I really loved the boys and their relationship with you. They brought a kind of natural aspiration—trying to meet the mark as performers alongside you (prolific)—that echoed the effort and sacrifice in the roles they played as devoted, lovesick, victim-soldiers. There was seduction running through it all: I felt held and allured by these characters—captivated and empathetic.You were very Lady Macbeth: the woman edging them into complete self-destruction.
Liina:
She is self-destructive, too. She’s an addict; she can’t stop, and she knows exactly where it’s going: getting her fix through another’s ruin, power by proxy. Her marginalisation gives her a leg up to be the one on their shoulders, pushing.
Alice:
Toxic. I’m obsessed with true crime because of how it reveals human fragility—the lines people cross that maybe, in certain conditions, anyone could.
Liina:
When I’m thinking about these villains, these power figures, I think we all have affinities—sometimes more submissive, sometimes more dominant, depending on the circumstances. Many of us might say yes, amen, to destructive forces in particular circumstances. That’s not to excuse doing so, but it may explain how someone comes to feel that they have found a purpose, a place, or a sense of belonging in the world.
Alice:
Step out of precarity. That is the hinge.
What’s a Mob to a King: Plot Twist Redemption by Liina Magnea premiered in the frame of the festival Never Work at Sophiensæle Berlin, 12–15 June 2026.