What if humans could do something to absolute perfection? Or if her most outstanding quality was dominant beyond all measure? Sébastien David plays through four such scenarios in his radio play gold girlwhich Anouschka Trocker staged for Saarländischer Rundfunk and Deutschlandfunk Kultur.
It’s about four women who can no longer escape their abilities or influences, which are rampant into monstrous proportions. On the one hand there is the gold girl from the title, the woman works in a bank. And the desire to be perfect in her job and in her life means that eventually she turns everything she touches into gold. Also her secretary, also bit by bit her own body when she touches.
The second wife is an unsuccessful writer and great doubter. There are dozens of versions of her texts for the theater, she can’t decide which is the right one, the best, the one she should submit to theaters and publishers. At some point the first doppelgangers appear and then more and more of them. The number of possibilities and text versions and attitudes to this is increasing exponentially. Is there still an original, a source? And if not, is that bad?
Biggest dream? Being a pixel in a Kurt Cobain music video!
Number three is dead, but digs out of her grave – and is celebrated by the living. A zombie, the living think that’s cool, they adore him, one is only too happy to become a fan of such a person. And so the (un)dead woman, who lusts so much for life, is not seen as a human being by the living, but only as a projection surface.
Finally, the fourth woman, who goes so deep into digital spheres that she becomes a pixel, also disappears from real life. This brings her very close to her youth idol Kurt Cobain, because she smuggles herself into one of his music videos and becomes a point right next to him. But what kind of closeness is that if it is not combined with warmth and emotion?
gold girl lives equally from the comedy and the tragedy of these four stories. The author and the director don’t bother too much with psychological patterns of interpretation. Rather, they aim at social realities, which they make particularly recognizable through this complete overstretching and distortion. And what consequences it ultimately has, what sacrifices it demands when you chase after what seems particularly worth striving for.
gold girlDLF Kultur, June 7, 2023, 10:03 p.m.