About the work
Sibylle Berg's sequel to Es sagt mir nichts, das sogenannte Draußen was premiered on 24 September 2015 at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, again directed by Sebastian Nübling. The production received the Friedrich Luft Prize as the best Berlin and Potsdam production of 2015 and was invited to the Mülheim Theatre Days in 2016, where it won the audience prize. The play continues Berg's ongoing chronicle of a female anti-heroine.
Plot
The protagonist of Es sagt mir nichts, das sogenannte Draußen has now become a mother. Her child Mirna is not planned, not cute, not Instagram-worthy. Instead Mirna confronts her mother with the full force of a real existence: screaming, demanding, not sleeping, the destruction of all self-designs. The mother has gathered a self-assembled family around her in the form of a shared flat and, with her flatmates, reflects on the ruptures of her new life. Between fits of rage, fantasies of revenge and tender moments, Berg unfolds a precise picture of the exhaustion of a generation of women expected to manage everything at once.
Cultural significance
Und dann kam Mirna is regarded as one of the most important contemporary plays about motherhood and expands the cosmos of the Berg-Nübling collaboration at the Maxim Gorki Theater. The Friedrich Luft Prize honoured the urgency and the comedy of the production in equal measure. The work has been restaged at numerous theatres and shows how Sibylle Berg, with each sequel of her series, continues to write the themes of a generation — from digital retreat through motherhood to death.