Macht

In the organizer's words:

by Heidi Furre
translated from the Norwegian by Karoline Hippe
in a stage version by Daniel Neumann and Patricia Camille Stövesand
Director: Patricia Camille Stövesand

"I don't know where the violence is when it has been committed. When it's like acid, it etches through the mattress, through the parquet, into the forest floor. Penetrates the brain and muscles. Becomes ugly, draws ugly furrows in the face. Skin rough and gray."

In her mid-thirties, Liv leads a well-ordered life in Oslo in the Norwegian style: she is the mother of two children and manages a household in a beautiful detached house furnished with Scandinavian designer furniture together with her husband Terje, to whom she has been happily married for several years. She attends parents' evenings, plans vacations, goes to the gym regularly and takes meticulous care of her appearance. She is also doing well professionally. Liv works as a nurse in a clinic and sacrificially does care work outside her family every day. When a familiar face enters her life, the pattern of her everyday life gradually unravels.

Going to the dentist suddenly becomes a challenge. When Liv walks home from the bus stop at night, she has to call Terje. Feelings of fear, anger, guilt and shame lurk everywhere, attaching themselves to her life and eventually developing a life of their own. The experiences can no longer be integrated into her life plan. Driven by a memory that has become alien to herself, Liv isolates herself from Terje, refuses to talk and thus becomes an outsider to her own story. With increased vigilance and the constant return of distressing fragments of memory and their suppression, we accompany Liv as she tries to cope with her everyday life under ever-increasing pressure of suffering. Only the connection and dialog with Liv's friend Frances, who tailors coats from remnants of historical fabrics and individual stories as an art project, offer her a chance to pick up the thread again, sew up her memories and tie up the loose ends.

In constant dialog with Frances and Terje, who embarks on his own journey as a relative to support Liv, the performance unravels subjectively and socially interwoven narrative layers before our eyes, which Liv tries hard to weave from a patchwork quilt into a coherent whole in order to regain the power of interpretation over her life. "Power" is not only a haunting portrait of a life that has come apart at the seams in the face of violence, but is also exemplary for many and unfolds its power as an indictment of the endangered lives of women not only in Norwegian society.

Heidi Furre, born in 1985, has already published several novels. "Macht", a NORLA recommended title 2021 (Norwegian Literature Abroad), is the first to be published in German by Dumont Verlag Cologne in 2023. The performance rights are arranged by ^{schaeferphilippenTM} Theater und Medien GbR Cologne. Heidi Furre works as a photographer and author. She lives in Oslo.

With: Henni Jörissen, Linn Reusse and Jan Thümer

Director: Patricia Camille Stövesand
Stage: Ruby Heimpel
Costumes: Carlotta Marmuth
Music: Merlin Gebhard
Choreography: Juri Jaworsky
Dramaturgy: Daniel Neumann

Further information: Macht | Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg