The Cold Reminder (AT)

Venue: Chamber - Routine and Façade: Christopher Isherwood describes a day in the life of university teacher George in his 1964 novel A Single Man. The young American author and director Sam Max takes the deep loneliness of the gay man after the death of his partner as the starting point for his adaptation, which pays homage to the original and goes beyond it. Questions about finding a stable self, social acceptance and belonging in increasingly complex social spaces remain as relevant as ever.

Sam Max writes about his reading of A Single Man: “In the novel, we see the inner processes of a man who desperately seeks relationships with others, but at the same time struggles with grief and internalized gay shame. This leads to self-sabotage and keeps him away from the very connections he so desperately wants. The encounters become a kind of mirror cabinet from which he cannot escape. Everywhere he goes, he sees his lost dreams and lost love, and he struggles to rewrite the narrative of his life for himself. At the same time, we see a portrait of a society that is homophobic both in a latent, microaggressive way and in an extreme, direct way. My adaptation focuses not only on drawing a character portrait of George through his relationships, but also on creating dramatic tension through dealing with deaths and deaths in the homosexual milieu of America.”

A Cold Reminder is the original title of the piece by Sam Max. And this (not easy to translate) “cold reminder” is also the basis for the aesthetic idea of staging, which plays with the circular character of time. The original title is inspired by a sentence from the novel that reminds us to take the relentless passage of time seriously: “But now isn't simply now. Now is also a cold reminder: one whole day later than yesterday, one year later than last year. Every now is labeled with its date, rendering all past nows obsolete, until — later or sooner — perhaps, no, not perhaps — quite certainly: it will come.” (But now isn't easy now. Now is also a cold lesson: a whole day has passed since yesterday, a year later than last year. Each now is marked with a date that makes every past now obsolete until maybe — sooner or later — no, not maybe, fairly certain: it will come.)