ANNIE ERNAUX                                        ERINNERUNG EINES MÄDCHENS

Schauspielhaus Graz

2026

CONCEPT| Dominik Puhl & Anna Klimovitskaya

DIRECTOR & COSTUME | Dominik Puhl
PLAY | Anna Klimovitskaya

STAGE DESIGN | LIGHT | Mara Madeleine Pieler

SOUND | Lukas Lechner-Heschl

DRAMATURGY | Male Günther

PHOTOS | Lex Karelly

The eponymous ‘girl’ Annie is 17 years old. Filled with images and ideas that she believes she must live up to, she spends a summer working as a counsellor at a holiday camp. She wants to belong, to fall in love, to experience for herself what everyone her age seems to take for granted. Her first sexual encounter with an older colleague is violent, but Annie forces herself to reinterpret the night as a passionate experience. Decades later, Annie Ernaux returns to her younger self through her writing. In vivid language, she describes the conflict between social expectations and the desire for acceptance. Only with the benefit of hindsight can the events at the holiday camp be interpreted as an experience of sexual violence, revealing the interplay of power, exclusion and shame. The precise observations of Nobel Prize-winning author Annie Ernaux highlight the complex connection between memory and identity, opening up a space for exploring sexual socialisation and self-empowerment. Anna Klimovitskaya and Dominik Puhl follow this perspective in their first joint project as actress and director. In a monologue version, they expand the text with their own experiences of growing up and make its transferability to general female realities of life visible.