A story about seeing the world with new eyes.
Imagine this scenario: you are staying in a mountain cabin with your friends. Your companions have gone into town, but only their dog returns in the evening. When they still have not returned the following morning, you decide to go and meet them. But after only a few hundred metres, you crash straight into an invisible wall.
This impenetrable glass wall is impossible to climb over, break through or dig underneath. Beyond the wall, birds lie scattered across the ground, while the people on the other side appear to be dead, frozen in the middle of their everyday activities.
You are completely alone.
This vision of horror forms the starting point for The Wall, a cult classic written by Austrian author Marlen Haushofer.
The first-person narrative begins two and a half years after these events. The woman looks back and recounts, chronologically, the challenges she has faced alongside the dog Luchs, the cow Bella and the Cat. At first, they remain hopeful. The cabin is well equipped, thanks to its owner's hypochondria and fear of nuclear war. But the question of whether there are other survivors who might come to their rescue constantly lingers at the edges of her thoughts.
The wall itself receives less and less attention. Its extent is too vast for her to explore the entire area, and before long it recedes into the background of her consciousness.
Slowly but surely, she is forced to learn how to live from what nature within the wall has to offer. She must come to terms with the possibility that she may never meet another human being again. She loses her relationship with her own face, her own name. Yet she finds an ever-deepening sense of meaning in nature, in the animals and in the daily work of survival – through birth and death, the changing seasons, growth and decay.
In The Wall, we see what prolonged isolation does to the human psyche, and how meaning can be found when one is cut off from other people. The Wall is therefore a story of both resilience and consolation, showing the strength and determination of an individual to survive when everything is set against them.
The performance explores who you become when confronted with change, and the choices you make. It asks how the world might emerge anew through care for life.
Please note that this performance will be conducted in Norwegian.
