If you wanted to find an image for FIND 2025, the Festival International New Drama at the Schaubühne, you would only have to talk about Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s new play. In Lacrima, the French-Vietnamese director — to whom this year’s festival is dedicated — weaves questions of origin, class and work into a story that spans continents. Commissioned to make a wedding dress for the British royal family, a British fashion designer, a Parisian pattern maker, lace makers in Alençon, and a bead maker in Mumbai set to work. FIND is characterized by the exploration of universal themes from different geographical perspectives. Current plays from around the world, always subtitled in English, have been staged in Wilmersdorf for more than twenty years. This year, with plays from France, Belgium, Ireland, Spain, the USA and Kyrgyzstan, the focus turns inward, toward families within their own homes. But at FIND, the private sphere is inherently political, whether in Saigon or Strasbourg. Walloon actor Cédric Eeckhout takes a deeply personal look back in Héritageby bringing his mother on stage. On paper, 75-year-old Jo lived exactly as women of her time were expected to — marrying at 19, having three children, building a house, buying dresses, and keeping up with the latest vacuum cleaner. Yet beneath this conventional life, Cédric Eeckhout discovers an emancipatory role model: a heroine who sought independence and passed this sense of freedom on to her son.
The protagonist in Safe House also wants to come to terms with a past full of violence and grief. In an empty handball hall in Galway, Ireland, the young protagonist, Tony winner Enda Walsh, and composer Anna Mullarkey sings her way into a new phase of life. The characters in Milo Rau’s Medea’s Kinderen struggle with similar traumas. Rau blends Euripides’ tragedy of the child murderess with a real Belgian case and lets the children themselves have their say. A daughter must speak and translate for her mother in Caroline Guiela Nguyen’s latest work Valentina. Guiela Nguyen, who researched the Romanian community in Strasbourg for the play, tells the story of what it means to take responsibility for your parents’ lives as a child with a history of migration. The daughter, Valentina, is caught between two stools. Does she translate a diagnosis of illness that does not bode well, or does she leave her mother in the dark? The FIND plays send us back to our everyday lives with these questions: How do we deal with pain, both our own and that of others? How do we find words when we can’t see the way out and still want to talk about hope?
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Bea Borgers, Louis Fernandez
Schaubühne at Lehninger Platz, Kurfürstendamm 153, 10709 Berlin–Wilmersdorf; map
FIND – Festival International New Drama 04.–13.04.2025. Find the full program here.
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