Write a letter. A letter to the diligent. Who is the hard worker, like Brecht Brecht and Kafka Kafka is. The diligent as a term, as a brand, as a type. But I would much rather write: Dear Marieluise. Dear Marieluise, you say what is a hundred years? Much, a blink of an eye? Are we out - finally - from the last century? Is our time today really a different one or is it just differently complicated? Then why the nervousness, why all the radicals, why do we have the feeling again that we are stuck in something phantasmagoric and inflammatory and that we are no longer kings in our own house?

A letter as a transit space, as a thread of Ariadne, as an invention machine. A letter to make something present, to talk about you, your circumstances and our situation. Do you see how I mean that? In letters you say I, it is direct. Dear Marieluise, I could write, I am here now, in Ingolstadt, where you come from. Where you lived in the north in the seventies, in the new building, on the first floor and could no longer write. Where you have known every face, every corner, every piece of sky above the city. I stand in front of your audience. How should I address it?

May I tell you about Anna?

Anna is eighteen.

She lives in Berlin and studies at our university, at the "Busch".

Anna wants to become an actress and comes from Munich, which you, dear Marieluise, should not be entirely unfamiliar with.

It's the year 2021 and Anna is rehearsing.

She plays the pregnant Olga from your first play.

During the breaks she sits in the university cafeteria and asks me: What are you looking at me like that?

She says that she can no longer make it through the streets well, that she feels puny, torn, rejected, that she longs for glamor, for champagne and big blobs and that hopefully it will soon be over with the diligent.

How to speak from the body

I look at Anna, her wounded gaze, and think: How the bodies are dragged into the words that one can no longer escape them. You have to be able to do that first. “I am exposing injuries that need to be healed,” I read from you, Marieluise. You didn't say: I am exposing injuries that will be healed. Not: I am exposing injuries that should be healed. Neither: I am exposing injuries that need to be healed. You said: I'm going into the wound because it opens the wound. Theater in the wound. Only that. “Just don't build a direct relationship to the horror” you asked. You said that over and over again. Show and say what is. That is difficult enough.

The workers and their Basedow bodies, says Leon.

He plays in "Purgatory" next to Anna.

He's the Roelle.

May I tell you about Leon?

How much I like talking to actors about lyrics.

You know what bodies are.

That there is usually too much body on stage and too little tone, weight, too little stage soul.

It's not easy to talk about things like this.

Misunderstandings quickly arise.

It's still complicated.

It is not with the end of the game, no, never.

They know how to speak from the body, how to expand, how to open up, how meaning becomes the body.

They know the use, the transitions, the end points, the silence of the organs when they play.

There are no Graves' bodies, I tell Leon.

Yes, he says.

And he's right.

It's a good word for your stage body, Marieluise.