Leonie Lorena Wyss

**Awarded the Retzhofer Drama Prize 2023 under the title wie von mutterhand **
Just a brief moment in which life tastes of wild joy. And then gone again, the mother. Disappeared in the bedroom. Meanwhile, the children eat fish fingers and soak up Titanic, soak up every word, every happiness and also the catastrophe, soak up Rose, who is as beautifully red-haired as their mother, suck and play and yet secretly fear that they are icebergs on which their mother threatens to crash.
Leonie Lorena Wyss describes with great sensitivity how differently children deal with their mother's mental illness. While the big iceberg takes on the role of mother and the middle one hurts itself in silent rage, the smallest iceberg keeps its distance emotionally: the mother behind the door becomes a puffing mother animal. With tender vigour and poetic precision, this play shows how the siblings playfully escape their difficult everyday lives and at the same time prepare themselves for impending doom. No moment is as beautiful as the one in which the mother takes part: Standing on the bow with arms outstretched, the wind in their faces and the spray, and above them the pink sky with its oh-so fleeting promise of a happy ending.
"The fact that this steel colossus of a theme does not sink immediately, even though the water is already penetrating from all sides, is due to the fact that the play finds a light-footed form despite this heaviness. As playful as the children who transpose the precarious situation into their film world, the play manages to lure us out of the trap of consternation through skilful interweaving, kaleidoscopic perspectives and playful wit." (Ferdinand Schmalz, laudatory speech Retzhofer Dramapreis 2023)