Prellung II
Reihaneh Youzbashi Dizaji:
Bruising II
2f; awaiting first production
A match over several rounds: two women stand in the ring, dance, cover up, and lash out. They clinch, and they break. This is a tough fight over the question of what a real fight should be.
The mother knows very well what she has to do. She is fighting for the liberation of her former home country. This is what gives her strength, and this alone makes it possible for her to accept the life in exile to which she has never been able inwardly to adapt. For her daughter, though, the place of exile has long since become her home, and she has very different preoccupations. Above all, she resents having been born for a fight that is no longer hers. In their struggle over their relationship with each other and over their own highly individual ways of coping with the world, the two of them continually and relentlessly batter each other. Blow by blow they vent the anger which nourishes all such conflicts – but at the same time they long to be together and to lead a free and happy life.
Reihaneh Youzbashi Dizaji has chosen an unusual approach to the question of how engagement and autonomy can be successfully combined in our times: she expresses the conflict through an intimate and touching piece of theatre. She refuses to take sides, and both her characters are simultaneously right and wrong. She allows them to go on living with the anomaly that there can be good reasons to fight for a life in which there is no longer any fighting, knowing that every fight is a pact with the Devil, even if it is only the Devil within.
Foreign rights