Ännie

It has been two years since 16 year old Ännie has disappeared. Two years in which time has seemed to stand still. Because conversation still revolves around how this girl could have disappeared without a trace. A girl who had always been the talk of the town: Born out of wedlock, the product of an affair, raised by a single mother on the margins of society, she was considered a highly gifted genius. She was both an outsider and an object of fascination – and her inexplicable disappearance made her all the more so.
The uncertainties of Ännie’s whereabouts lead the inhabitants of this place that time seems to have forgotten to the most divergent speculations: She went to war as an Islamist; no, she went underground as a neo-Nazi; no, she was the victim of a violent crime or maybe committed one herself; no, it was all staged and she is living quietly on a remote island, just like Elvis or Jim Morrison. 

Even Fred, a former police officer who supposes himself to be Ännie’s biological father and has taken up the investigation privately, is unable to find the real reason for her disappearance. Because the memory fragments of her teacher, her dealer, her former classmate, her confused mother Romy or of Pierre, her then friend or lover (who can tell) sketch entirely contradictory portraits of this enigmatic girl.

And so in her mystic absence, Ännie develops into an omnipresent projection surface for the characters surrounding her. They may not make any headway towards the truth with their speculations, but they reveal a great deal about themselves and their own abysms, their secret fears and their innermost longings.

Thomas Melle, who writes prose as well as theatre plays and has won several awards, creates a polyphonous cosmos in “Ännie”, where the façades of what seems to be an unambiguous world conceal a complex system of parallel realities.