Five prosperous children are reunited at their family villa after a long time. Their parents have just died but the three sons and two daughters feel little in the way of grief. None has happy memories of childhood or puberty. Failed characters each of them, in an alcohol-soaked night they ask themselves the question: Who am I? And how could we become who we’ve become? The accumulated horror of the past engulfs them – incest, sexual abuse, suicide attempts. The boundary between fiction and reality becomes increasingly blurred. Doubts arise whether all this is a genuine confrontation with the past or a morbid flirtation with horror – are they just five bored, well-off people filling out their banal biographies with some spectacular content?
Falk Richter translates and adapts Oscar van Woensel’s drama, transferring it from the Dutch to a German context and directs for the first time at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg.
German Translation by Falk Richter.