Das Buch der Unruhe

In the organizer's words:

"I haven't been alive for months, just drifting between the office and physiology, in a deep inner standstill of thinking and feeling. Unfortunately, this doesn't even give me peace: there is fermentation in the rot."

Bernardo Soares is the one who so poetically expresses the sigh of a frustrated employee. And he, in turn, is one of the many literary egos used by the great Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa.

Bernardo Soares is an assistant bookkeeper in a fabric store in Lisbon. He lives in a furnished room, works most of the time and finds life an imposition. His attempt to escape the monotony is writing - and so he jots down his observations, thoughts and dreams in his meagre free time: "The true landscapes are the ones we create for ourselves. Not one of the seven parts of the world interests me so much that I really want to see it; I travel the eighth, and it is mine."

"The Book of Restlessness of the Assistant Accountant Bernardo Soares" - the full title - collects the hundreds of notes of this little man. In the process, it creates a grand panorama of earthly existence. Pessoa's descriptions of human restlessness are an overwhelming and deeply tender text about knowledge, about seeing, feeling and thinking. It is a book "of such profound wisdom that one wants to cheer!" (Denis Scheck).

Fernando Pessoa, who worked as a small commercial clerk in Lisbon in the early 20th century and wrote for the drawer throughout his life, is now one of the pillars of European literature and one of Portugal's national poets. He died in 1935 and his "Book of Unrest", published posthumously in 1982, must be counted among the works of the century.

Director Luise Voigt most recently worked at Schauspiel Frankfurt and Hamburg's Thalia Theater and is known to audiences in Düsseldorf for her highly acclaimed production of Büchner's "Woyzeck". She stages Pessoa's affectionate notes on humanity with an eight-person ensemble and with great visual power as a rambling reflection on our perception