An den Rand der Erschöpfung weiter

Marie is a successful actress, showered with awards. She has achieved everything a woman can achieve in her job. But now she breaks with her old, glamorous life to start a new one. While Marie packs up her flat, she lets her memories run wild: of the best and the worst moments of her career, of her husband and long-time director, the sad love of her life – only for him is she making her last movie, showing her goodbye. An intimate documentation of her feelings, a reckoning with her lovers, a testimony of her departure into a new life.

Mein letzter Film: the reckoning of a great actress who lived and played all parts in her life. Bodo Kirchhoff has dedicated this text to Hannelore Elsner.

The child has a disability, one must assume. Day after day it digs holes in the garden, obsessed by the thought of coming up again in New Zealand. In its withdrawn strangeness, the child is an easy target for the vanities of its fellow men. And when the child strikes its therapist dead and buries him one day, it forces clear reactions. But again, everyone is only revolving around themselves.

So, the bodybuilder and wordsmith are in the same boat; what is stolen is not only the body, but intertwined with it, also the writing, the word. The word that I – struggling as if I was exercising again – have to get my hands and my pen on.

“A bed-ridden senior is surprised by a visit from the first wife of her son-in-law, who became friends with her successor, the daughter of the old woman, and is bringing a TV following her request. Two strangers tentatively try having a conversation which adheres to the clichés of social conduct.” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

Rent boy Aldo prepares to welcome a couple, new clients, together with his Filipina wife Mercy. And while he is agonising about what to wear (“tie or no tie?”) and she prepares the food (three fish, tenches, which at first are still thrashing around in the kitchen sink, are put on the table, one after the other), Aldo has no idea that this time he is playing with fire while sitting on a powder keg.
During the course of the evening, events take an unforeseen and unplanned turn. Not only does Mercy warm up to the idea of becoming a prostitute herself, but Dr. B., the exceptionally successful author of a television series, and his wife Ingrid, who refuses to take a bath “before” despite being asked several times, confuse Aldo with their erratic behaviour.
And after Aldo has somehow finished the “business” part of the evening with sex-hungry Ingrid (what exactly happens between the two stays in the dark, obviously), provocations during the arranged mutual eating of fish let the true desires, fears and aggressions of the two couples escalate to the point where they nearly end in a murder. That would be a brilliant inspiration for crime author B’s next screenplay, if he wasn’t involved in this play as well and if the ending wasn’t open. (Announcement Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe)

On a cold winter’s afternoon, nine teachers meet in the conference room of their grammar school. They are facing a difficult task: one of their pupils, Viktor Leysem, who has come of age recently, is accused of raping his seventeen-year-old classmate, Tizia, by her mother. Supposedly, it happened after the shared theatre rehearsal at school. It’s a “he said, she said” situation. Some of the teachers see Viktor as a rebellious troublemaker, who has previously attracted attention by behaving inappropriately towards teachers and classmates. Other teachers think he is an excellent pupil, bright and intelligent, one they’d like to have more of.

Based on the difficult decision the teachers must make this very day, ten people meet in a closed room in a way never seen before. Old debts, wounds, taboos, hate and love erupt and nearly make a rational decision impossible. A drama about guilt, focused on the human phenotype “teacher”.

In Wer sich liebt, several people meet in the context of a literary event, in a conference and leisure centre. They belong there more or less, seen in the context of their different relationships towards absent celebrities – to the imaginary.
Ludger is a writer and obviously doesn’t feel well; Astrud is an arts editor and wants to stay at arm’s length; Margit collects autographs and wants more than just the signatures; publisher Mayer-Lay believes he is pursued by a rejected author; his daughter Frederike is doing research for a book about torture; Werner, his bodyguard, keeps an eye on Margit; Vera gives life advice; Friedhelm is her companion; a waiter asks for orders. In between two black asylum seekers appear, as well as Dieter, Ingrid, Klaus and Petra, who talk about tennis.
The conversations, chats and scenes which unfold from the ongoing meetings are variations on a longing for the same, variations on the conservative; they complement each other in a text which keeps heading towards comedy.

“A playwright accidentally becomes witness to a scenario of sex, crime and money in the 40th floor of a Frankfurt high-rise building… fascinated, the hidden playwright takes notes of what is said in the luxury apartment,… when he runs out of paper, he continues writing on his skin, writes on his whole body, in order not to miss a bit of these incredible intrigues and sexual obsessions, to the extent that he is willing to risk his literary skin to reveal them.” (Deutsches Allgemeines Sonntagsblatt)

Is good old striptease dead? And did its audience dissolve into dust as well, retreat in front of the TV? Or has it only died for those who are supposed to get undressed? If so, it still exists, and our time doesn’t lack exhibitionistic wishes; but how do you get one to the other? By using language – how else? The announcer of a strip show enters the stage. He promises the last classical strip tease on German soil: Andrea (or Andreas) will only be wearing a red ribbon at the end, which poses an irrevocable invitation to the audience (the reader), to imagine this ribbon as removed, not only for the moment, but forever more, which can’t be underestimated as a form of torture. But Andrea (or Andreas) seems to be late, and all the announcer has are sentences like the one with the ribbon; he has to keep talking and talking and to keep people’ hopes up for Andrea’s (or Andreas’) arrival, even though the person Kirchhoff’s monologue is about is there from the beginning – maybe wearing too many clothes to be visible, maybe too naked…