ANNIE ERNAUX: Der junge Mann / Die leeren Schränke

In the organizer's words:

In its new production, the independent theater Fensterzurstadt brings two works by Annie Ernaux to the stage: The Empty Cupboards (1974), her literary debut, and The Young Man (2022), a late text from her autobiographical work. Annie Ernaux, winner of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Literature, is one of the most influential voices in contemporary European and international literature. In her work, she combines personal memory with analytical acuity and makes individual experience visible as part of social reality. In her work, writing becomes a form of self-positioning - between origin, language, body and history. The evening shows both texts in two consecutive productions - performed by the same ensemble and in the same stage space. In this way, a work becomes visible that has developed over decades and has remained consistent in its precise approach to reality. At the center is a narrator, embodied by three women of different ages: Annie as a young student, Annie in middle age and Annie in old age. These time levels are present simultaneously and make it possible to experience how experience is updated, shifted and re-read. Die leeren Schränke tells of growing up in a socially restricted environment, of shame, difference and the attempt to free oneself from it through education and language. The young man focuses on a later phase of life and the retrospective view of an intense relationship with a younger man - and on the traces that the past leaves behind in present-day experience. This dual perspective unfolds into an evening of theater about memory, origins and self-determination - and about how a life is constantly reshaped through writing. With the production Der junge Mann / Die leeren Schränke, Fensterzurstadt returns once again to the old petrol station in Hanover - to a fascinating place that will be reopened, rediscovered and transformed for a summer with this production.

ACTING: Emma Djampour, Alexandra Faruga, Floriana Sommerauer / Carsten Hentrich, Heino Sellhorn // DESIGN & PROJECT MANAGEMENT: Ruth Rutkowski, Carsten Hentrich // STAGE: Melanie Huke // COSTUME: Ruth Rutkowski // MUSIC: Heino Sellhorn // LIGHTING: Alexander Tripitsis, Melanie Huke

Based on Le jeune homme and Les armoires vides by Annie Ernaux, ©Gallimard. Translation by Sonja Finck. Performance rights for the translation: Suhrkamp Verlag AG Berlin.

DER JUNGE MANN / DIE LEEREN SCHRÄNKE is a project of fensterzurstadt.48 and is supported by the Kulturbüro Hannover, Niedersächsisches Ministerium für Wissenschaft und Kultur and the Stiftung Niedersachsen.