About the work
“#Motherfuckinghood” is a devised piece by Claude De Demo and Jorinde Dröse: the actress Claude De Demo, an ensemble member of the Berliner Ensemble, initiated the solo evening and developed it together with the director Jorinde Dröse. The text is a collage combining writing by Antonia Baum, Mareike Fallwickl, Emilia Roig, Jana Heinicke, Alexandra Zykunov and De Demo herself. It premiered on 1 February 2024 in the Neues Haus of the Berliner Ensemble, directed by Dröse with De Demo as the sole performer; the evening runs just under an hour and a half without an interval. The production has since toured to other theatres and is also shown at Schauspiel Köln.
Plot
The evening sets society’s ideals of motherhood against lived reality. Shifting between roles, from the exhausted working mother to the corporate careerist, De Demo combines comic scenes, personal stories, statistics and essayistic reflection. It addresses invisible, unpaid care work, the economic disadvantages mothers face at work and in their pensions, women who choose not to have children, and the relationship between mothers and sons; violence during childbirth and a stillbirth are also discussed. It ends with a reflection on toxic masculinity and the question of how manhood might be redefined.
Cultural significance
The piece takes up the feminist debate on motherhood and care work of the 2020s and uses texts by some of its prominent voices as material; it also draws on the theorist bell hooks and on research by the sociologist Jutta Allmendinger. Critics praised its angry directness and political urgency, while noting occasionally abrupt shifts between comedy and analysis. The premiere ended in standing ovations, and the production has since toured, including to Wolfsburg and Prague.