Kokain

Some people use drugs to feel more. Others, to feel anything at all. In this production, you will be using cocaine. Whether you like it or not.
Pitigrilli’s scandalous novel „Cocaine“ was published in 1921 and depicts interwar Europe: a young generation caught between exhaustion and excess, delusions of grandeur and a sense of disorientation. His relentlessly cynical language and precise social observation remain astonishingly relevant to this day.

At the centre is Tito Arnaudi: journalist, con artist, performer of himself. He consumes not only cocaine, but possibilities — success, attention, relationships, intensity. Amidst a decadent society, journalistic power games and obsessive relationships with the self-determined Maud and the sophisticated Kalantan, reality, hallucination and moral boundaries increasingly blur. Whilst Tito sinks ever deeper into addiction and a rejection of life, Maud and Kalantan attempt in different ways to survive in this world: through conformity, social advancement or radical self-promotion. Pietro and the newspaper editor, too, navigate a society that has long since forgotten how to find peace, with bitter humour. “The first things cocaine destroys are willpower and shame,” writes Pitigrilli.

The stage adaptation tells the story of outbursts and the consequences of boundlessness, of people who find themselves caught between the high of drugs, emotional emptiness and the desire to escape from themselves and the world. When does a high turn into addiction? And how much of it does it take to survive in this world?