A Rainy Day in Gurlitsch

About the performance

The production is 2 hours and 5 minutes long.

A married couple in their late thirties, Peter and Ingrid, live a comfortable life in the suburbs of Klagenfurt. Apart from worrying about crises such as a new war in Europe, increasing social inequality and the threat of climate change, their only real problem and life challenge so far has been their failed attempts to conceive a child.

We enter the story of Peter and Ingrid on the day they discover that an expensive necklace has disappeared, which, in addition to material value, also has great emotional value, as Ingrid got it from her great-aunt, a well-known Austrian post-war feminist author. The feeling is all the worse because their necklace was not stolen somewhere on the street, but the thief had access to their home. Peter, a journalist (middle-class intellectual), decides to find the culprit, and the tracks lead him to the side of Klagenfurt he did not even know existed.

By describing the identity crisis of the European middle class, the performance speaks to the dual nature of the traumas caused by loss – is it more important to face the sense of loss itself or the fact that we never really had what we mourn?

"This journey of the main character to the bottom of existence – which takes him from a respectable neighbourhood to the local pubs, to deserted parking lots, to drinking in corner latrines, and finally to the sodden floor of a gloomy forest, from laid-back relationships to increasingly strange, even sinister characters from the outskirts, whom he does not understand, as he does not understand the real conditions in society, but through a kind of ‘disintegration of the subject’ he becomes very similar to them – is in its compulsion both grotesque and tragic." Gregor Butala, Dnevnik, 29 March 2023

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