Sanaa is twenty-two. She is studying, sometimes escapes into a love triangle with a boyfriend and a lover, and she has dreams. Everything could be fine if it weren’t for reality, which keeps pinching her – pinching her like the crab that bit her back in the Middle East. That was before her family came to Europe from northern Iraq. They came in the hope of being able to lead a better life here. But now the family lives in a dreary German tower block, in a ‘closed society’, characterised by mutual control and sanctions.
Sanaa wants to break out of this panopticon tower block. There is the melancholy mother, the frail, mostly absent father, the pubescent sister and an aunt who is the resolute, overbearing moral guardian of the tower block. But Sanaa doesn’t manage to break out. Her family keeps her tied down. Especially the fate of her depressive mother Asija holds her back.
Cologne actress Zeynep Topal is the centre of this first theatre production of Karosh Tahas book. She is supported by an intercultural ensemble of young adults with Albanian, German, Palestinian, Syrian and Ukrainian roots. In ‘Krabbenwanderung’, they play out their migration story, portraying the pain of being uprooted, being torn between two cultures and longing for their own secure place in society. The play is about the ‘life in-between’: between freedom and responsibility, memory and future, between happiness and unhappiness, myth and reality.
