80 Tage um die Welt

80 days around the world

Staging - Kim Mira Meyer

Text - Nicholas Frei

Music - Victor Ardelean

Set and Costume - Gretl Kautzsch

Phileas Fogg, wealthy gentleman of London's high society, is stuck in a cell in Liverpool. His mad dash around the world in 80 days has been interrupted and he has been arrested - just before completing the journey and winning his bet!

But Phileas Fogg can't be stopped and begins to talk. Calmly and confidently, he practices reporting on past experiences: for the opponents of the Reform Club, for the press, possibly even the queen, who could grant him, the savior of the empire, an audience! After all, Phileas Fogg, in the service of inexorable progress, plowed the earth by railroad and steamboat, unchecked by obstacles, looking left and right, from Suez to Bombay and Calcutta to China and Japan, across the Pacific, through America back to England. Phileas Fogg is now telling all of this, alone with himself, to pass the time.

But time is getting shorter with every minute - not only for him and his bet, but possibly also for the world out there, which Phileas Fogg thought he could control with iron discipline... Does this world even still exist? Can it exist without HIM, the white, civilized, self-empowered achiever who has subjugated the earth and shapes it according to his will? Then why doesn't anyone open the prison door for him? It is slowly dawning on Phileas Fogg that he may remain alone in this empty space forever, trapped in his head, in which he, the first global player, the imperialist, the capitalist, the meticulously calculating calculator and planner, not just his bet threatens to lose, but has long since lost all nature and humanity, which he has always successfully and mercilessly ignored in his blind haste after his own gain...

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