Open rehearsal: “Die Möglichkeit des Bösen”

A heavy, seductive scent of roses hangs over the beautiful Pleasant Street. Miss Strangeworth loves her roses: for her, they represent home and this home is Strangeworth House on Pleasant Street. The unremarkable woman is the anchor of her neighbourhood. She has been living here for three generations: everyone knows her and she knows everyone else. Yet nobody suspects that the universally respected Miss Strangeworth is pursuing a clandestine second life. Her secret pleasure will become the doom of the community.

In her precisely choreographed and visually powerful works, director Marie Schleef zooms in on the forgotten, the repressed and the invisible and finds ways to translate the oppressive inner state of her characters into emotional images. In Shirley Jackson, Schleef has discovered a classic American author and mistress of the uncanny who is all-too-little known in Germany. Jackson’s novel “The Haunting of Hill House” inspired horror writers like Stephen King and most recently served as the basis for the eponymous Netflix series.