Ingrid Strobl

Rückfall
1 D, 1 Dek
frei zur UA
“A marriage of heaven and hell. That’s exactly what heroin is: a marriage of heaven and hell.” Ingrid Strobl’s first work for the theatre is the merciless chronicle of a relapse. What’s special about it is that the protagonist isn’t a Christiane F., a young person who may have fallen down the social ladder. No, Lisa is a seasoned woman, 51 years old, working and fully integrated in society.

But she isn’t happy. Her past haunts her. When she was a young woman, she lost her best friend to the drug and only narrowly escaped the same fate. Her resulting clean life is based on too many compromises. The present is a consequence of that: her shadow-like life, a job which doesn’t fulfil her, her husband who creates more emptiness by constantly being absent, physically as well as emotionally. A constant non-recognition.
“I’ve censored myself for long enough. … Now, you will have to listen to what the real Lisa has to say. Unedited.” Lisa records a video for her husband, in which she says and shows everything she had to hide for over 30 years. Alongside the reasons for her planned relapse, addiction itself becomes a topic. With an open and completely unsentimental outlook, Lisa talks about the ambivalence of addiction. She doesn’t deny the lure of the drug, she is aware that there can be no high without addiction. The drug is freedom and prison at the same time.

Rückfall shows how complex the personality of an addict is and why it’s so difficult to escape behavioural patterns – no matter whether in addiction or in “normal” life.