Schmetterball

Ari and Flo became friends playing table tennis. After the holidays, they planned to go to secondary school together. Now Flo sits alone in class. Ari has died of heart failure. But the teacher doesn’t know about Ari’s death yet, and Flo can’t bring himself to tell her. He claims that Ari has been selected for the Olympic squad, where he’s being trained to become a table tennis star. A web of lies from which he cannot so easily extricate himself. Dorian Brunz skilfully shifts between fantasy and reality. In concise scenes, which in their dialogical ping-pong have something of a match about them, he describes – at times tenderly, at times comically – how, after a loss of memory, one can be flooded with memories that do not even exist. (Theresia Walser, Selection Committee for KinderStücke 2026)

World premiere: 17 May 2025, Theater Oberhausen

Cast: Nadja Bruder, Anke Fonferek, Jens Schnarre, Tim Weckenbrock

Director: Thomas Ladwig
Set and costume design: Gesa Gröning
Dramaturgy: Saskia Zinsser-Krys

Performance rights: 

Rowohlt Theater Verlag, Hamburg

A commissioned work for Theater Oberhausen
The play and the production have been supported as part of ‘Nah dran! Neue Stücke für das Kindertheater’ (Close Up! New Plays for Children’s Theatre), a collaborative project between the Centre for Children’s and Youth Theatre in the Federal Republic of Germany and the German Literature Fund, with funding from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media.