Kaspar & The Sea of Houses

At the webpage of The Norwegian Theatre the following, among other things, is written about Kaspar & The Sea of Houses:

"Three child protection workers find themselves in even rougher everyday conditions when their colleague Bjørn is suddenly burnt out. Who is to take over all of his cases? Where are all his case papers?
When they finally find these, it turns out that he has 104 cases he has not followed up upon. The mountain of cases just grows, they see no end to the work assignments. The feeling of always being behind schedule is not to live with. There is a sea of such as Kaspar Hauser.

The result of a field study
With dark humour and quick retorts the German playwright Felicia Zeller captures the daily life of a profession with one of the most difficult tasks in our society. The text was written after she had followed child protection workers in Berlin for about half a year, gaining insight in a daily life of time pressure, extreme stress, changing piles of cases, neglected children, harassment in the media and unfinished sentences. The production points out how difficult it is to be a friend of people when one is bound by paragraphs and institutional rules. The play has won several awards and since the world premiere in 2011 it has been performed at more than 60 theatres in Europe.

Caught in the system
The play may seem as an overwhelming flood of words. It is absurd as well as comical and grotesque - a kind of Modern Times of paragraphs and tyranny of rules, producing losers with the 'efficiency' of an assembly line. The caseworkers desperately try to understand the rules they are employed to enforce, but keep getting lost in their own interpretations and are in danger of becoming clients within the same system.
Director Hilde Brinchmann has wanted to make a production with which all who have ever experienced the madness of public offices or well-meaning bureaucratic labyrinths may come to the theatre and laugh until they cry.

Who is Kaspar Hauser?
The slightly mysterious title refers to a familiar and fantastic story about a teenager who showed up in the streets of Nurnberg in 1828, claiming that he had grown up in a dark cell from he was small. Later the most incredible stories about who Kaspar Hauser was developed.

The myth of Kaspar Hauser has inspired several poets and writers during the years, including Paul Auster and Peter Handke. The story has also been adapted into movies, including by Werner Herzog. Within psychiatry one refers to 'The Kaspar Hauser Syndrome' as a collective term for children who have been victim of such neglect they have developed mental and physical dysfunctionality."

SOURCES:

The Norwegian Theatre, www.detnorsketeatret.no, 08.10.2014, http://detnorsketeatret.no/index.php?option=com_play&view=play&playid=427

Import from the Scenekunst.no list of openings 11.09.2014