Theater Oberhausen
Music and sound design for a play by Josep Maria Miró i Coromina directed by Bram Jansen. In collaboration with George Dhauw.
About
Two couples from Western Europe suddenly find themselves trapped in the hotel where they are staying in some strange non-European country. A revolution, or at least some kind of uprising, has broken out in this country. And Jaume and Laura, Àlex and Eva apparently don’t have the slightest idea about the political background of the unrest.
Jaume remarks in all honesty: “To me they all look the same.” A little later he will admit: “We don’t know anything about these people.”
Nothing is certain anymore. And above all, it is no longer safe to take to the streets here as a European. But escape is also impossible because the airport is closed. And no one can seem to say when it will reopen. “We have to wait. All we can do is wait.” They are trapped. The hotel management warns them that they shouldn’t even open the windows in their rooms. And so Jaume and Laura and Àlex and Eva are sitting in a hotel, seemingly protected from the outside world, where they just happen to be staying next to each other in rooms 301 and 302. That is the situation. But only it’s outer shell.
Because the playwright Miró i Coromina creates a second world inside his drama, an almost inextricable web that plunges these two couples into an abyss of lies, hurt, vanities, sexual desires and mutual betrayal. “Everything is so uncertain,” someone says at some point in a brief moment of clairvoyant helplessness. And indeed: everything is uncertain in this exciting drama by Miró i Coromina. How can his heroes escape? And to whom? The threatening exterior of the foreign insurgents or the threatening interior of their love relationships and their feelings?
Josep Maria Miró i Coromina was born in Barcelona in 1977. The Catalan author and director became known in the theaters and at international theater festivals in Europe primarily through his play The Archimedes’ Principle, which was created in 2009, but only three years later, in July 2012, in cooperation with the Sala Beckett in Barcelona in his own Director premiered.
After Anatol by Arthur Schnitzler and Das Käthchen von Heilbronn by Heinrich von Kleist, the young Dutch director Bram Jansen is staging a contemporary play in Rauch as a German-Dutch collaboration.
Credits
Text: Josep Maria Miró I Coromina
With: Elisabeth Kopp, Keja Klaasje Kwestro, Torsten Bauer, Peter Waros
Direction: Bram Jansen
Scenography: Kaspar Zwimpfer
Costume design: Martina Müller
Sound design & music: Jorg Schellekens with George Dhauw
Dramaturgy: Rüdiger Bering
Première
14 May 2016, Malersaal, Theater Oberhausen (Oberhausen, DE)