Christine Brückner

Just like the novel version – “If you had talked, Desdemona” – the play version of Brückner’s Ungehaltenen Reden ungehaltener Frauen turns out to be a significant and nuanced statement about history and presence, from a female point of view.
In these monologues, very different women get a chance to speak. Some are taken from literature, others really lived. What they have in common is that they have a lot to say, but weren’t heard in their own time or situation. And for all of them, daily life is as much a topic as the political context surrounding their thinking or feeling – living ideological criticism, touching and startling at the same time.

Clytemnestra bemoans the megalomania of her husband Agamemnon, Katharina Luther talks about the gap between aspiration (a godly life) and reality (strife in daily life); Donna Laura, Petrarch’s great platonic love, refuses to accept being seen as a saint after having to behave like one her whole life; the Virgin Mary wishes herself back to the time where the followers of Christ simply believed and didn’t want to know (as they do now). Her suffering as a rejected mother is paralleled by the worries of a derided early Christian; for Gudrun Ensslin, the solitary confinement becomes an “illusionary confinement”: she dreams of a real life and settles a score with the wrong person: with her pietistic father, her egomaniac husband and with herself, who couldn’t be a mother to her child. “We have thrown ourselves into the wheel of history and have fallen into the spokes.”
Further speakers: Christiane von Goethe, Effi Briest, Sappho, hetaera Megara, Desdemona, the Lady of the Camellias Marguerite Gautier.