Die Welt im Rücken (The World at Your Back)

Joachim Meyerhoff is a specialist for artistic solos of all kinds, and – having spent his childhood at a psychiatric hospital (where his father was Senior Consultant) – he is not afraid of this medical field’s concerns. He was one of the initiators of this dramatization of Thomas Melle’s autobiographical novel “Die Welt im Rücken (The World at Your Back)”, and now he sets out on an equally ecstatic and painful introspection of a manic-depressive patient. He may be alone on stage, and yet it is as if there were many. The protagonists’ story is constructed along lines of perceptions that have spiralled out of control and a total loss of reason. Jan Bosse’s production translates this into an artistically unbounded “theatre of objects”, where reality and mania are often indistinguishably alike. Gigantic dream-fabrications emerge from the smallest things, opening up new horizons with the apparently simplest of theatrical devices. Super-ego or brain mass? Breakfast egg or ping-pong ball? That is the question, over and over again.

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