BÖSES GLÜCK / CULT OF THE DAUGHTER

All this here is supposed to be harmless, neither out of the ordinary nor monstrous. Henriette wasn‘t a monster. King Kong is a monster, and she didn’t look anything like King Kong. She was a housemaid who grew up in a farming family. A poor farm girl in the big city of Paris. She was so lost. So lost was she. A lost and quiet figure who, without any explanation, committed a monstrous deed. It was an act that disturbed the urban landscape in which she suddenly found herself, an act that beat down before the eyes of the onlookers like a black, enigmatic meteor. It left everyone speechless. No one would have said anything had the psychiatrists not wanted to talk about it at all costs. They were determined to crack it and psychiatrize it. To quote the famous words of the Belgian fin-de-siècle writer Gerard Walschap: “You cannot understand a human being.” The incomprehensible is what connects us most. Yet the psychiatrists went like: „Of course we can! This is perfectly understandable, not by you, but by us! Here on the Left Bank in Paris, we’re quite capable of understanding rural life and have it thoroughly examined until everything about this abnormal country life which threatens our normal life has been psychiatrized and destroyed. Wait, destroy is not the right word. I‘d prefer being helped, yes, helped is the word. It’s all insanely dangerous around here.“ Do you know what Samuel L. Jackson says in almost every movie he’s in? ”I have a bad feeling about all this.“ And that’s what the psychiatrists said, but they also said they would crack it, making everyone here feel normal and safe again. In their words: “So that everyone finally understands what we understand to be normal.“ And you know, thinking about it and since you were using agricultural jargon like arable land, buttermilk, village idiot and stuff – so where’s the chicken? Where’s the egg? What is a reaction to anything? Is the normal just a reaction to that which is abnormal and monstrous, or is it the other way round? Are all lived experiences dangerous? You know, I’m currently in the process of writing a few short stories and theatre pieces that seem to touch on this subject. Mostly comedies, because I find it very difficult to take anything else seriously. I even dare to try my hand at vaudeville. I just love having too many characters, too many props, too many backdoors, and most of all too many plot twists, quirks and aberrations, all the way to delirium. My texts are full of hints and references to psychiatric discoveries. Just take hypnosis! Audiences usually find it hilarious. In one of my most frequently played pieces, a man hypnotizes his wife so that he can sneak off to meet his mistress. Unfortunately, his skills as a hypnotist are far from perfect, and when his wife discovers her adulterous husband’s betrayal, she decides to take revenge by making him believe that she was raped every time he was away. It’s a huge hit. The usual theatregoers find it hysterically funny.