The place: an empty stage. The signs: a bicycle, a roccocco dress and suitcases. Voices and sounds. A song. Gestures and situations. Vanishing points. Ruptures and repetitions in a script of eighty-one short scenes for the stage.
The story of the bicycle and a man, for instance.
“He rides repeatedly in wide circles on the empty stage. He circles and circles. He stops. Looks fixedly at the opposite wall, gets a running start and races toward it.
Blackout.
Sound of impact.“
A play with moments. Miniatures which are lit shortly and then hidden again. Intervals of scenic action and splinters of dialogue. Fragments of breath as a game of questions. Under the taciturn dialogues lies a concealed story.
The moments correspond with each other, show motives that repeat themselves with an acrobatic ease, they double, they triple, become more and more turbulent images. Variations, new constellations and combinations of actions and characters, in “a kind of comic kamikaze” (Schimmelpfennig). The empty stage as the place for a delicate net of encounters and relationships, written like a film maker, a painter and a poet.
Roland Schimmelpfennig
Vor langer Zeit im Mai
Einundachtzig kurze Bilder für die Bühne
6 D, 6 H, Geräusche, Musik
UA: 13.03.2000 · Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin · Directed by: Barbara Frey
Translated into: English, French, Spanish, Turkish