Kokain

Do you control your needs?

Some people consume in order to feel more. Others use to feel something at all. With this production, you will use cocaine. Whether you want to or not.

Pitigrilli's scandalous novel "Cocaine" was published in 1921 and tells the story of Europe between the wars: of a young generation caught between exhaustion and excess, fantasies of grandeur and disorientation. Its relentlessly cynical language and precise observation of society are still astonishingly relevant today.

At the center is Tito Arnaudi: journalist, impostor, performer of himself. He not only consumes cocaine, but also opportunities - success, attention, relationships, intensity. Between a decadent society, journalistic power games and obsessive relationships with the self-determined Maud and the glamorous Kalantan, reality, hallucination and moral boundaries become increasingly blurred. While Tito falls deeper and deeper into dependency and denial of life, Maud and Kalantan try to survive in this world in different ways: through adaptation, social advancement or radical self-dramatization. Pietro and the newspaper director also move with bitter humor through a society that has long since forgotten how to find peace. "The first things that cocaine destroys are willpower and shame," writes Pitigrilli.

The stage adaptation tells of outbursts and the consequences of boundlessness, of people teetering between drug intoxication, emotional emptiness and the desire to escape themselves and the world. When does intoxication turn into addiction? And how much of it is needed to survive in this world?