Das große Heft

In the organizer's words:

"The Big Booklet" based on Ágota Kristóf and directed by Ran Chai Bar-zvi

A pair of twins are sent to the countryside. The big city they come from is being bombed. It is war. Their grandmother lives in the last house in a small town near the border. The children experience the harshness of country life and the harshness of a society at war. Dead soldiers in the forest, air raid alarms, misery and hunger are omnipresent. The twins gradually begin to adapt to this brutalized world: What initially seems like children's games soon serves only to toughen them up. They train their bodies and minds in increasingly drastic exercises and become more and more independent players in village life.

Ágota Kristóf's trilogy of novels develops the twins' story in precise sentences with a unique pull. "The Big Booklet", "The Proof" and "The Third Lie" tell the story through a labyrinth of shifts in perspective and false trails, about numbness, attempts to cope and the question of what war does to a child's identity. The Hungarian-Swiss author has received numerous awards for her work and has been translated into over 30 languages. Ran Chai Bar-zvi is staging the play for the first time at the Münchner Volkstheater and also weaves texts from the sequels into his adaptation of "Das große Heft" . In search of his brother, a now grown-up twin looks back on his childhood experiences, which gradually appear in a different light.

More info here.

What director Ran Chai Bar-zvi says about the play.