TRUDE HERR - oder: Es ist besser, in der Sahara zu verdursten, als in Köln-Lindenthal zu sitzen und auf die Rente zu warten.

In the organizer's words:

Production Sebastian Kreyer | Costume design Maria Roers | Stage design Thomas Dreissigacker | Video and music Valerij Lisac | Assistant director Hannah Sarah Greve
With Matthias Buss and Sebastian Kreyer | Premiere: 30.09.2017 | nominated for the Cologne Theater Award 2017 | Duration: approx. 95 min. without intermission

Admired much and scolded much: Goethe's famous words probably apply to hardly any person in the recent history of Cologne as they do to Trude Herr. Initially celebrated as a critical carnival speaker in the post-war carnival, she soon found it difficult to get away from the stereotype of the corpulent dandy. Since she couldn't find a theater anywhere that was suitable for her vision, she built one herself: in the Theater im Vringsveedel, she worked from 1977 to 1986 as an actress, author, director, costume designer, prop maker and manager, in order to reinvent popular theater in this way - but for many Cologne residents, this invention was too drastic and too vulgar. Trude Herr's relationship to her hometown always remained ambivalent: time and again she turned her back on Cologne to realize ambitious film projects in the Sahara or to emigrate to the Fiji Islands, but at the same time she sang hymns of critical love for Cologne with Niemals geht man so ganz and Die Stadt. Today it is time to rediscover Trude Herr as a performer whose radical display of feminine self-determination ensures that Vringsveedel and Sahara can equally be places of existential experience: "At the center of her plays is always a fat woman. She always plays for survival." (Jürgen Flimm)