Portrait. Image. Concept. is not a piece of spoken theatre which is based purely and exclusively on a textual version. The project operates in different media, revealing their structures and the extent to which they can be represented in the theatre. It is about transferring new media such as video, CD-ROM, computer codes and TV editing techniques into a way of writing for the theatre.

Richter: Imagine a dynamic young female presenter who is dragged out of bed in the morning live on camera. She has to present an interactive game show completely unprepared, whose rules she has to think up the moment she says them. She becomes an advertising commodity, because she has to construct an image which can be marketed.
S.F.: How was the character created?
Richter: On a computer and live on stage.  –  There’s a sampling programme available on CD-ROM, a virtual text as a basis for developing the character and the production.
S.F: That means that the actress produces text live in line with the specifications of your programme?
Richter: Yes, physical gestures, mime, emotional gestures, rhythm, forms of media discourse, topics, characters, concepts of images, movement… the actress channel hops through a range of possible characters and genres.
S.F: And emancipates herself from them.
Richter: Performatively. The programme is flexible enough to accommodate the personality and individuality of each actress who can take pleasure in using someone else’s material to construct her own self with its own idiosyncratic logic.

Falk Richter directed this play in 1994 with Bibiana Beglau in Hamburg in the Zeisehallen and at the Thalia Theater.