Thursday, November 11 | 20:30 | Schauspielhaus | Studio
Irmgard Keun / Gottfried Greiffenhagen:
THE ARTIFICIAL SILK GIRL
performed by Yvonne Ruprecht [Germany]
Doris is a young, working class, German woman in the early 1930's. She comes from a small town, and she wants to be a star. Infatuated with the glamorous images she sees in advertisements and on film, she moves to Berlin to enjoy the glitz and glamour of the capital of the Weimar Republic. There, she must make ends meet by dating men who will feed, clothe, and house her. With untiring resolve and biting irony she faces her fortune, which rises and falls with the good and bad people she encounters. Doris’ constant struggle to get by reveals a remarkable interrelatedness between her strong-willed perseverance in a world in which everyone must look out for themselves and her utter dependence on the kindness of others. Despite her lack of education, evident in her provincial dialect and frequent grammatical mistakes, Doris is a keen observer of the circumstances surrounding her, so that her malapropisms and idiosyncratic grammar become poetic expressions of her experiences.
The Artificial Silk Girl is a novel by Irmgard Keun published in 1932. Dramaturg Gottfried Greiffenhagen created two different stage adaptations of Keun’s novel: one version for a cast of six and a solo piece which is considered a classic among German-language one-man shows. Yvonne Ruprecht from the Kiel Theatre performed successfully on stages throughout Germany.
directed by Olaf Strieb
produced by Theater Kiel
language: German | running time: 70 minutes
