director

director

MIDNIGHT MOVIE

- by eve leigh

Anhaltisches Theater Dessau I Premiere September 2022 / German Premiere

"Midnight Movie takes us into the world of real madness without moralizing. Tough, but good."
Andreas Montag, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, September 26, 2022

"The rift between psychological dissolution on the internet and the longing for perfect physicality becomes a tensile test that Bangerter explosively condenses. […]"

Roland H. Dippel, Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, September 16, 2022

"As the popcorn releases its distinctive aroma, the audience in the nearly lightless room regroups. Suddenly, the boundaries between acting and reality are broken down."
Andreas Behling, Volksstimme, September 16, 2022

How can we overcome the limitations of our own bodies? What distinguishes digital experiences from real experiences? Is there even a difference?

In the endlessness of a long night, a whole world opens up next to the bed. A woman suffers from insomnia and takes refuge in the infinite vastness of virtual reality. In the open windows of the browser, a student wanders through a ghost hotel, a teenager falls into the clutches of a stranger, and a man searches for pictures of his brother in a Ukrainian prison. While her boyfriend sleeps beside her, the parallel worlds blur into a universe of digital ghosts that can be approached and succumbed to without a physical body. But will she find her way back when morning dawns?

The text by young author Eve Leigh, which premiered to great acclaim at the Royal Court Theatre in London in 2019, is a masterfully composed and highly entertaining digital ghost dance that tells us a lot about our times. It is not only in the months of the pandemic that the internet has become a digital counterworld more than ever before. In Midnight Movie, it becomes a single, infinitely ramified continent for the protagonist and the audience to discover. And it marks the debut of a young author who is introducing herself to the German theater scene for the first time in Dessau.

Surtitles will be provided.

Stage rights Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Hamburg
 

Directed by Rebekka Bangerter

Stage and costume design Samuel Herger

Music and Sound Michael Lohmann

Video Robert Boehnel

Dramaturgy Sahar Rezaei

With Josephine Nahrstedt

Nicole Widera