Früchte der
Vernunft

Three women. Two men. One egg. A stork. A room, sparsely furnished. A multitude of loosely connected situations play out in this place that has fallen out of time. All these episodes are about the female body, about fertility and childlessness, about reason versus lust: bizarre, funny, touching.

A sensual and thematically strong web of narrative threads unfolds here: for example, about the Old Testament woman Hanna, who cannot have children. There is also this young employee who is confronted everywhere with the question of having children (she always has an egg with her – just to be on the safe side). There is also a woman who secretly watches porn and does not know whether she should feel good about it or rather bad. And not to forget: Where to put the baby?

Both societal perspectives on the female body as well as biographical experience of the director and author Saara Turunen have fed into the associative cosmos of the production. Are women not expected to deny and celebrate their bodies at the same time? What results for them from morality and discipline? And where does this shame come from? Why does the enjoyment of food and the enjoyment of one's own body – both pure pleasures, are they not? – so often produce feelings of guilt?

Playwright and director Saara Turunen tells us about all this. The award-winning Finn's unmistakable signature is evident in her thoroughly composed theatrical language, which is both musical and pictorial, and her precise sense of timing, which draws as much from absurd theatre as from surreal films. Using language sparingly, she carefully weaves original images, strange in the best sense, into a world of her own. After Saara Turunen's enthusiastically received production of Das Gespenst der Normalität, she now returns to Schauspielhaus Bochum: with a humorous chamber play about existential (and not only female) questions – with three women, two men, an egg and a stork.