Gerhard Meister

Who hasn’t had the idea before: I’m stopping here, I’m done with everything, I'm not going to go on anymore. Of course you don’t carry through with it. You are rational and don’t want to lose everything you have and everything you have tried to believe in: career, family, future. Gerhard Meister's latest play has an absentee in its center, one who stood up from his workplace and, from one moment to the next, left behind his career, family, and future - to feed ducks. Der Entenfreund revolves around a missing person who does not speak himself, but who is present in the conversations which are carried out between his wife and a childhood friend, his superior, and his successor; then there is also the woman from the company who talks about him as if he were her lover, and a man who is busy with the extermination of vermin, to which, in his mind, the duck friend belongs more and more.

In this play, Gerhard Meister sketches the portrait of a man in dialogues and monologues. From different perspectives and different lives, different images of a completely fascinating man arise. Through his inexplicable behavior, the apparently self-evident way of life of the others falls apart under the pressure to explain itself.

In September 2004, Der Entenfreund was honored with the special prize of the Société Suisse des Auteurs. Gerhard Meister wrote the play in the 2003/04 season whilst on a scholarship of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg.