He can still remember their first meeting. It was in a church where the Americans had put a boxing ring. Cigarette smoke everywhere. Fanny kept popping up between the pillars and smiling at Herbert, the former Wehrmacht soldier who had just fought his way to Freising. Decades later, Herbert likes to dig up this moment from his memory. Now plagued by the wish, “But before you die, I must die first.”
“The Boot and His Socks” is the name of the play in which the writer, director and artist Herbert Achternbusch, who died in January, put the two characters Herbert and Fanny together. They live in their own reality, an interdependent life that escalates into fantasy. They are a similarly absurd couple as there is in Samuel Beckett. In 1993, Achternbusch staged the five scenes himself in the Munich Kammerspiele with Rolf Boysen and Rudolf Wessely as Fanny and Herbert. Jan Hoeft is now showing his first directorial work at the Bavarian State Theater with “The Boot and His Socks”. The premiere is on Friday, November 11, in the Marstall. Sibylle Canonica, Arnulf Schumacher and Max Mayer are there on the stage. Also on the artistic team is Ann Poppel, who worked with Achternbusch as an outfitter and costume designer and is now sure to bring old memories into the new.
The boot and his sockpremiere: Friday, November 11, 8 p.m., Marstall, telephone: 21 85 19 40