Minor Matters

 

by Gitte Kath and Jakob Mendel

Translated from English by Bea Lauber

 

Production: Brigitte Dethier

Music: Roman Riklin

 

With: Peter Rinderknecht

 

For native speakers; from 6 years +

Duration: ca. 55 minutes

Premiere: Mai 2004

Junges Ensemble Stuttgart

 

 

When the audience comes into the room, a beggar is sleeping in a corner. This is how “Minor Matters” begins. The man has a story to tell. A story about awakening, about wishing and hoping, but also about disappointment. Together with the audience the storyteller brings to life a farm. Once a farmer had been living here. He tilled the ground, tended the cattle. He was content. But suddenly he started to think something was missing, too calm and tidy was his life going along. So one saturday evening the farmer goes to town. There he meets the love of his life. He and his wife start a family, everything seems perfect. But in the same way the idyll grew out of nothing, it also breaks down in the end.

 

Since more than two decades the actor, director and author Peter Rinderknecht has been one of the most important representatives of Swiss theatre for a young audience. Being the artistic leader of the “Theater en gros et en détail” his performances are shown in various countries all over the world and are staged in different languages. Minor Matters, for instance, is played in German, French and Spanish.

In his very open and authentic form of storytelling he brings fantasy and reality so close together that one can hardly tell one from the other.

 

Press quotations

 

… and the Ensemble’s fine show, Minor Matters, comes as a sharp reminder of just how challenging, forceful, and occasionally sombre the best of children’s theatre now is. Rinderknecht is a magnificent actor, who generates real drama – as well as a fair amount of fun – out of the sceptical, exasperated relationship between this proud, rejected man and his audience; and the result is a solo performance that transcends theatrical categories, to stand comparison with the very best.

The Scotsman, 24 May 2007

 

Peter Rinderknecht is scarily realistic as a beggar. Without complaining or accusing, he tells us how he and his young family gave in to the hard sell and got up to their ears in debt.

Reutlinger Generalanzeiger

 

“Now they could have been satisfied”, he says. But no way. They need a washing mashine, thousand rotations per minute, a drier, drill, microwave, stereo and such things. To repay the loan, the farmers have to plough and slave till the marriage is broken and the man is lost.

Stuttgarter Zeitung

 

What do we need to be happy? asks the play very suitable for children. It gives the actor the opportunity to overcome “the fourth wall” and to include the young audience as well as the adults in the theatrical playing in a very natural manner.

Stuttgarter Nachrichten