Die Kopenhagen-Trilogie (The Copenhagen Trilogy)
based on the novels «Childhood» – «Youth» – «Dependency» by Tove Ditlevsen adapted for the stage by Tom Silkebergbased on the novels «Childhood» – «Youth» – «Dependency» by Tove Ditlevsen adapted for the stage by Tom Silkeberg
Copenhagen’s working-class district of Vesterbro in the 1920s has little room for the talent and dreams of young Tove. She leaves school at the age of fourteen and is sent against her will to work as a maid and later as a clerical worker. However, she refuses to give up, publishes her early poems and stories and continues to seek her freedom as a writer. In the «Copenhagen Trilogy» Tove Ditlevsen uses her own biography to tell of an escape from a complicated everyday reality into storytelling, skilfully interweaving fiction and reality. Her first-person narrator, with whom she shares a name, delivers a humorous and laconic account of a personal life that is nevertheless political.
The bluntness with which Ditlevsen writes about what it means for a woman to want more than society is willing to grant her is by no means at odds with her utopia of a life of artistic and literary success. Ditlevsen’s autofiction can be seen as guidance for self-empowerment and represents a great writer’s legacy of female protest.
Having previously announced this important project twice before, the Residenztheater now makes a third attempt to bring it to fruition, directed by Elsa-Sophie Jach, one of the Residenztheater’s resident directors whose sprightly, highly musical productions are consistently based on original textual interpretations.
«In her writings, Tove Ditlevsen maps the world she is born into: the apartment that is too small, the narrowness in the faces of her parents, her good-looking but permanently dissatisfied brother, the neighbours, the stolen glances, the secret visitors, the gathering political storms. In her writings she creates a new reality that she is also writing her way out of in a search for broader horizons – horizons that she not only finds in her words but which genuinely do open up for her as an artist as a result of her work. However, she always remains an outsider, yearning for opportunities for escape, even if these have the potential to destroy her.» Elsa-Sophie Jach
