A production based on the plays ‘Sleep My Baby Sleep’ by Jon Fosse and ‘A Piece of Plastic’ by Marius von Mayenburg.

Jon Fosse (Haugesund, Norway, 1955) is one of Scandinavia’s most famous writers and most-performed dramatists.  His plays are staged all over the world. ‘Sleep My Baby Sleep’ is a real gem. The play is representative of Fosse’s style and approach: fragmented dialogues in which the rhythm and the sound come before the meaning, pared down sentences with an underlying poetry and emotional tension which confine and destabilize the spectator and at the same time give him space and comfort.    

‘A Piece of Plastic’ is the most recent play by Marius von Mayenburg (Munich, °1972), dramaturge and playwright-in-residence at the Berliner Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz since 1999.  It was written as a comedy with the theatrical structure of conventional boulevard theatre, but then seriously unhinged boulevard theatre…

The main story line is straightforward enough: the overworked Ulrike and her husband Michael, a left-liberal, environmentally- and politically-aware couple, at least in theory, employ Jessica as a domestic help and to look after their son who is hitting puberty prematurely.  Jessica’s presence affects the reality of this family on various levels. The ideals of tolerance and broadmindedness are undermined, good intentions prove to be futile attempts to deny underlying prejudices and the couple’s sterile reality is exposed. Then there is the conceptual artist Haulupa who like a gadfly tries to disrupt the family ideal.  The result is a malicious comedy, which expertly challenges our views and opinions about family, art and society.  With painful accuracy, Marius von Mayenburg takes us straight to the nub of our first-world dilemmas and problems…

“I understand so little. And as the years pass, I understand less and less. It is true. But the opposite is also true, that as the years pass I understand more and more. Yes, it is also true that as the years pass I understand a great deal, an almost frightening amount. As a matter of fact, I feel almost faint at how little I understand and almost frightened at how much I understand. How can it be that both things are true, that I simultaneously understand less and less and more and more? (Jon Fosse, ‘The Gnosis of Writing’)

We also played a French version of the performance with Quoi/Maintenant.