Yellow Line

A cow falls out of the sky, sinking a fishing boat. An artist lets herself be locked into a cage and auctioned off to benefit Libya. A web designer is arrested at the airport for stepping over the yellow security lines and causing a commotion. The play Yellow Line only gradually reveals how these seemingly unrelated events are connected. European border police is interrogating the North African fisherman after they pull him out of the water – naturally, no one believes the story of the cow, but everyone assumes that he is an economic refugee or a terrorist. Simultaneously Paul, the web designer, cannot stand the strict rules at the all-inclusive resort where he and his girlfriend Helene, the artist, are vacationing: pre-set dining hours, numbered loungers, prescribed walking paths. He prefers to watch TV coverage about a run away cow named Yvonne, before completely losing it on the flight back. At the same time, somewhere else, a livestock manager is promoting a revolutionary new type of cow barn which makes industrial livestock farming completely automatic and “humane”, people in Egypt are fighting for democracy, a pilot talks about how computers control plains, and so the circle to the falling cow is complete ...

A feeling of dizziness pervades one, as Juli Zeh and Charlotte Roos knit together the many threads of the story tighter and tighter and lead them to a glorious finish. By using the format of a fast-paced, satirical comedy they demonstrate how surveillance systems work ever so discretely and globally, and how much freedom we are willing to sacrifice to live with a sense of security.