Jan, the son of the house, was long considered lost. After 20 years, he finally returns home and rents a room in his mother’s and sister’s hotel under a false name. He wants to observe the situation from under cover and find out what home and the family mean to him. He has no idea of the murderous acts that the women perform to secure their livelihood. Mother and sister have lost all moral scruples, and they don’t know who their new guest really is …

In his drama »Le malentendu« (»The misunderstanding«), which premiered 1944 in a Paris that was occupied by Nazis, Albert Camus deals with the question of home and exile with the power of a classic tragedy. Here he contrasts Europe’s power of destruction with a vision of a free human existence; the synonym for this is the land next to the sea.

Nikolaus Habjan stages the piece with three expressive, human-sized puppets that proceed to merge with the actors over time. They are more threatening and bestial than any human mime could be. The drama becomes a criminal piece, a thriller with a ghoulish atmosphere reminiscent of Alfred Hitchcock.

Albert Camus is one of the most important French authors of the 20th century. He was born in Algeria, which was then occupied by France, as the son of French-Spanish immigrants in 1913. He wrote novels, essays and theatre texts and was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1957. In 1960 he died close to Paris in a car crash.