spinne

Julia is in her mid-forties, working as a poorly paid translator and proofreader and lives in an unheated, badly soundproofed flat in Wedding. Marcus, her ex, lives right next door and she can follow his new relationship in detail thanks to the thin walls. When her neighbour keeps her awake one night with loud music, Julia starts to think about the past. What happened to Krispin, known as Kris, her best friend and the most important person in her childhood and teenage years? She has not seen him since she moved away from Bremen at the age of 15. The next morning, Julia embarks on a search for her old friend. Much to her surprise, she discovers that Kris now lives in Berlin, too, is married and has a son. A few days later, Julia is sitting ‘purely by coincidence’ in the Italian restaurant in Charlottenburg which she has seen in photos on his wife’s Facebook page. Then Kris actually turns up at the restaurant and he and Julia begin to talk about their youth and their life in Berlin. Kris is a lawyer and is just as wealthy as his father was when they were young; alongside his flat in the city, he owns a house in the Uckermark. Although Julia and Kris now move in different worlds, there is an easy familiarity between them which is only disturbed when Kris’s wife Christiane and son Korbinian join them after a shopping trip through the designer stores of Kurfürstendamm. As Julia talks to the family, it becomes increasingly clear that she and Kris—who both described themselves as anarchists in their teenage years—have politically drifted far apart ...

In spite of having diametrically opposed political beliefs and being absolutely convinced of being on the right side, is it possible to have a genuine connection and maybe even be friends? What is the relationship between someone’s political attitude and their childhood, the social milieu in which they grew up and in which they now move? What role is played by personal experiences and individual fates?

»spinne« (»spider«) is a monologue about the difficulty of really communicating with one another despite political conflicts and different life choices.

Maja Zade’s plays »status quo«, »abgrund« (»no words«), »ödipus« and »reden über sex« (»talking about sex«) are in the Schaubühne repertoire
and have been translated into languages including Norwegian, Swedish, Latvian, Polish, French and English. »spinne« (»spider«) is her directorial debut.