Outland

Four people are expelled from the world because their bodies don’t work the way they should. When a young woman is fired from yet another job, each encounter with another person turns into an attempt to diagnose why she can’t find a foothold in society. Caught between Catholicism, Joy Division and a yearning for change, two teenagers living in a provincial town fall in love for the first time. After a suicide attempt, the boy is hospitalised while the girl realises that his illness also threatens her existence. The son of a doctor and ethics expert disappears without trace, disrupting the polarity of her moral universe. Only when the son turns up several weeks later does his mother realise that her emotional state of emergency felt more real than the old humdrum routine she’d become so used to. In an old people’s home the residents look back at a century of war and privations, and feel exiled from a country that they helped to build.

Anne Habermehl’s play disrupts aspects of our lives that serve as anchor points and define our social relationships in love, family and work. The resulting gulf between «me» and «the others» must be filled with meaning if individuals aren’t to feel excluded from themselves. Yet it also presents a more general question about how our society views and processes injury.