EUROPE – MY HEART WILL BE BROKEN AND EATEN
Worldpremiere
On three screens Armin Petras will project a split, forked vision of Eastern and Western Europe, a historical, personal and public retrospection, a political and intimate foresight. We escort a young woman through the streets of Eastern European Cities talking to a man on the phone, restless, continuously travelling.
The audience lays down on comfortable deck chairs, surrounded by the images and the sound of the movies. The telephone monologue is directed towards a man who never answers and never appears in any of the movies – but is constantly present: on a small platform, amidst the spectators, the actor/dancer is exposed to their visual acuity, cruel, emphatic. Everything is possible.
EUROPE – My Heart Will Be Broken and Eaten is inspired by Jean Cocteau’s La voix humaine and written by the romanian author Salat Lehel. The play unfolds around a telephone call between two unnamed, almost symbolic characters – “a woman, young / a man, no longer young” -, in which personal as well as global themes come up, but only her Eastern European accented English can be heard.
Their complicated long-distance love relationship – he lives in Western Europe, has a good but boring job, is married and has a child; she lives in Eastern Europe, is trying to realise her dream of becoming an actress and hopes for a better future for herself – forms the basis of their conversation and gives illuminating insights into the divide that persists between Eastern and Western Europe.
The famous German director Armin Petras who works for theatres all over Europe makes of this play a poignant piece of political art, where a strong realism incessantly interacts with at times delicate, at times disturbing poetic images, only to unveil truths – about the relationship between East and West, but also between Man and Woman – that remain unseen as long as one does not try to understand the Other. On stage, the Luxembourgish dancer Jean-Guillaume Weis meets, on screen, the Romanian actress Maria Tomoiaga.
Text: Salat Lehel
Direction: Armin Petras
Video: Jochen Gehrung
Dramaturgy: Ruth Heynen
Assistant: Sarah Rock
With: Maria Tomoiaga, Jean-Guillaume Weis
A production: Théâtre National du Luxembourg