Marburg
The play THE PUBLIC SPACE tells the story of a couple that increasingly loses itself in the tension between reality, appearance, and delusion, as well as virtual and imaginary worlds. A seemingly trivial police case plunges the man into a spiral of distrust, fear, and paranoia. To counteract the feeling of losing control, he equips his apartment with surveillance cameras and security technology. At the same time, he finds himself uncontrollably drawn deeper into an influential circle of power pursuing political interests in his profession. His wife, a sociologist, suddenly deviates from the norm at her workplace and thus loses her balance. In search of a way out, she spends her nights in internet forums, no longer just following strangers online, but also on the street, and increasingly loses herself in the thought worlds of political groups. Although they appear to move in opposite political camps, their paths intersect in a web of surveillance and loss of control. For they have long since become objects of surveillance themselves 2013 in a sinister public space of digital networks, avatars, trolls, hackers, and bots. With THE PUBLIC SPACE, awarded the Hamburg Literature Prize in the category of Poetry/Drama/Experimental in 2019, playwright Ulrike Syha paints a picture of a society marked by polarization, insecurity, and the loss of shared realities. Director Anne Decker sees in the text a mirror of the present, where digital technologies influence political opinion formation, power dynamics, and democratic processes more than ever before. For all people aged 15
