“The stars are roaming and so am I”, Isa writes in her diary. This diary is the only thing that she is carrying with her. Isa is 14 and has escaped from a psychiatric ward. Now she is traveling through forests, rivers and fields, across streets and parking lots. But just as she is crossing the German plains, she is also crossing her own internal world. She runs and burrows, she rages and lingers, her feet are bleeding and her heart yearns. Isa is an outsider in the classic meaning of the word. She is “as mad as Büchner’s Lenz, as lost as Robert Walser’s Jakob von Gunten, as sensitive and cold as Camus’ Stranger” (DIE ZEIT) – the only difference is that she is a girl. And yet she is no victim, she is powerful and rich. Her loneliness is of an almost mythical dimension and describes a deeply human fundamental experience. On her travels, she comes across some pretty peculiar characters. They come and they go – leaving Isa alone with herself time and again. Among them are two boys whom most of us have met before. They are the protagonists of Wolfgang Herrndorf’s successful novel Tschick. A brief flirtation, a short period of happiness, the pulse of life beating. But again, no true connection is made. Isa is left alone under the stars.
Wolfgang Herrndorf was already very ill with cancer when he wrote Bilder deiner großen Liebe. He never completed the text. Instead, he left a touching fragment behind, a confrontation of the individual with the world. Markus Bothe will stage this invocation of imagination and freedom. He approaches both classic and contemporary material by creating powerful images and poetry, always looking for beauty in the darkness.