Eden Cinéma

In the organizer's words:

by Marguerite Duras
Director: Moritz Rux

The land that the mother had leased from the land registry of the colonial administration was supposed to finally fulfill the promise of happiness: fertile land on the coast, rich harvests, trade with Europe, wealth. But the dam that the mother wants to build against the sea and its natural force cannot hold. The soil is ruined by the salt of the sea, the population dies of hunger and disease, nature brutally stops the insatiable hunger of the white colonizers for land, goods and money. Together with her almost grown-up children Suzanne and Joseph, the mother vegetates in poverty in a dilapidated bungalow on the brink of bankruptcy. But when they meet the melancholy Monsieur Jo one day, everything seems to change. He is the rich heir to a wholesaler, drives a huge car and falls in love with Suzanne. His money could be used to buy a car and a gramophone, to try out the dam project again, to pay off the debts and to cultivate the fields. The survival of the family and the mother's grotesque fantasy of conquest are pitted against morality, emotion, individuality and the future. A radical struggle begins, a confusing battle for the value of life and love. What they win melts away and is lost in the misfortune of a paradise they should never have entered. "Eden Cinéma" is a play written by Marguerite Duras based on her novel "Un barage contre le pacifique". The book is one of her early novels and was published around 1950. It contains many autobiographical traces. Duras was born in 1914 in what is now Vietnam. At the time, the region was occupied by France and exploited as the "Indochine" colony. Duras' mother raised Marguerite and her brothers alone, she worked as a teacher and pianist in the cinema before being leased a piece of land by corrupt land registry officials in the 1920s, which, contrary to promises, could not be cultivated.

Duras was still an ardent supporter of colonization during the 1930s. It was the occupation of France by the Nazis and her work in the Resistance that brought about a change in her thinking. The novel, set in the early 1930s in what is now Cambodia and Vietnam, is an early testimony to this turning point.

With: Mehmet Ateşçi, Rosa Lembeck, Josef Ostendorf and Alberta von Poelnitz

Director: Moritz Rux
Stage: Julia Oschatz
Costumes: Adriana Braga Peretzki
Lighting: Annette ter Meulen
Dramaturgy: Ludwig Haugk

Further information: Eden Cinéma | Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg