Helene does the unfathomable: Wordlessly, she gets up from the dinner table and throws herself from the balcony. Her family is in shock. Helene’s best friend Sarah wants to help and becomes a pillar of support for Johannes, the totally overwhelmed father – just until everyone is back on their feet. That’s what she thinks. But months go by and Sarah’s own life is almost casually pushed into the background. A feeling of seething rage is making its way to the surface. Helene’s daughter Lola feels this rage even more strongly and she accuses the patriarchy as a whole. She blames her mother’s death on the system and decides to declare war on the overpowering opponent.
It isn’t the significant and distressing event that drives Mareike Fallwickl’s protagonist of Die Wut, die bleibt to her almost incredible act, but rather the mundane every-day. The sum of physical and mental overload, loneliness, social demands and conditioning, the constant encroachment upon one’s own limits – which many mothers can probably relate to only too well. Radical and harrowing, author Mareike Fallwickl traces a great arc across the concept of being a modern woman: from motherhood to the question of wanting children via the gender care gap and the destructive aspiration to live up to all role images and expectations. And finally to a young generation who is ready to throw all of these allegedly natural circumstances overboard and to question what it means to be a woman today, and how we might disrupt long-established patterns.
Jorinde Dröse worked as a director at various German-language theatres from 2002 to 2016, including Schauspiel Frankfurt, Münchner Kammerspiele, Schauspielhaus Bochum, Thalia Theater Hamburg and Maxim Gorki Theater, where she was director in residence from 2010- 2013. She has been working as a mother since 2009 and was a forest-based educator and home-schooling teacher between 2017 and 2021. In 2022, Jorinde Dröse resumed her work as a director and will now be directing at Schauspielhaus Hannover for the first time.