“Forgive me. I can no longer live with my nerves.” With a suicide note in hand, the naked body of a woman is found in the back seat of a car in Paris on September 8, 1979, wrapped in a blanket, an overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol in her blood. It is the U.S. actress Jean Seberg, an idol of the cinema of the 50s and 60s like Marylin Monroe or Romy Schneider. She began her career at the age of seventeen, when Hollywood director Otto Preminger chose her to play Joan of Arc. With Bonjour Tristesse and Godard’s Out of Breath, she became the face of the Nouvelle Vague and a style icon at the same time. Seberg embodied a completely new, self-confident type of woman. She lived a fierce, short life, in constant rebellion against the backward-looking America that is currently celebrating its resurrection with Donald Trump.
The circumstances of Seberg’s death remain unclear to this day. Rumors still persist that the FBI had a hand in her death. For when she began to take an interest in the American civil rights movement, became active against the Vietnam War and supported the Black Panther movement, she became an enemy of the state in the USA. The FBI staged a real smear campaign against her in order to destroy her career.
Actress and singer Anneke Schwabe and director Dania Hohmann set out to track her down. From interviews, letters, poems, police files and songs of the time by Juliette Greco and especially Nina Simone, they create a musical-scenic portrait of this unusual woman. They sketch – as the weekly Die Zeit wrote shortly after Jean Seberg’s death – “a sad, delicate and also a sordid story about which only one thing can be said with certainty: who the victim was.”
“Anneke Schwabe is a star all the way.” Hamburger Abendblatt, Hans-Jürgen Fink
Lorenz Bösche
Percussion
Stephan Krause
Dania Hohmann
Alexander Fahima
Stage
Georg & Paul
Costumes
Susann Günther
Music
Manuel Weber
Dramaturgy
Ulrich Waller
Light
Marion Kuhlmann
Sound
Oliver Giese, Stefan Hoffmann
Melanie Burgemeister
Christoph Warken
Annette Krüger, Britta Schmidtke, Katrin Wehnsen
Lighting
Annika Schlüter
Video
Enrico Rode
Production
St. Pauli Theater Hamburg
With Anneke Schwabe
http://www.annekeschwabe.de
