Jens Roselt

Dreier
1 D, 2 H, 1 Dek
UA: 10.07.2002 · Staatstheater Stuttgart · Directed by: Alexander Tull
Nearly unintentional cruelties are strung together. Words are not weapons but thumbtacks, which the wife and her lover – her husband’s supposed best friend – use to beat each other around the head with. Every movement of these characters is as cynical and petty as the erotic constellation that they find themselves in.
The husband appears at the door unexpectedly and the scene for a relationship drama is set. But this moment, so full of possibilities, bursts like a soap bubble: acts and situations are played out and discarded again. An agonising farce begins in which no-one wants to expose themselves and no stance is taken, until the drama finally does run its course…
The characters in Roselt’s play half-heartedly try to transform their sterile and lacklustre world into a melodramatic one. But the most important things are missing: jealousy, fateful love, hate, and friendship are light years away from these pallid amateur actors’ performance of their own lives.
Sprinkled with a proper measure of black humour and ironically quoted comic elements, Roselt’s “post-dramatic” play gives bitter insight into the dismal emotional world of an urban middle class.
Translated into: Italian, Dutch, Slovenian