BILDER DEINER GROSSEN LIEBE

In the organizer's words:

by Wolfgang Herrndorf
Stage version by Robert Koall

100 minutes no intermission stroboscopic effects

It's summer, Isa has escaped from a psychiatric ward and is now on foot on a kind of road trip through the country. "The stars are wandering, and I'm wandering too," says Isa. She is 14 and so much more than that. If you want, you can find the whole world in her. Lightness and heaviness, present and memory, death and life. "Isabel, ruler of the universe, the planets and everything. When I want the sun to stand, the sun stands," she claims, and the further you trudge barefoot through the world with her, the more unequivocal this statement becomes. Isa has her own way of thinking, her own reality with her own - or no - rules. She relentlessly exposes herself to life and all its facets. She faces every encounter on this journey with such unconditional intensity, mixed with naivety, curiosity, courage, strength and determination, that you stand by in amazement. Sometimes you want to be warned and sometimes you just want to experience it unconditionally. A bargeman, a writer, a child, a dead hunter... and somewhere in between Tschick and Maik. At this point, Herrendorf's two novels TSCHICK and BILDER DEINER GROßEN LIEBE are linked almost by chance, yet remain separate works. The girl from the garbage dump is now the protagonist and we experience the meeting of the two boys, who are on their way to Wallachia in the Lada, from her point of view.

Isa is as crazy as Büchner's Lenz, as lost as Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten and as cold as Camus' Stranger, writes Iris Radisch in DIE ZEIT on September 19, 2014 shortly before publication, placing Herrndorf's novel fragment among the great works of world literature. BILDER DEINER GROßEN LIEBE is the last and unfinished novel by the author, who was unable to finish it due to his advancing cancer and ultimately took his own life. In some places, PICTURES OF YOUR GREAT LOVE remains fragmentary, which once again emphasizes Isa's way of thinking. Isa's mental illness and her thoughts on death and mortality as well as her incomparable zest for life are based not least on the last phase of Herrndorf's life.

The young director Laura Ollech brings all of this together in her production, which marks her debut. She stages the text for all generations aged 14 and over and takes Isa and us on a journey through life with all its facets.