Magda Toffler. Attempt at silence

With his new play, Boris Nikitin conducts genealogy and looks at the history of his grandmother. When she dies at the age of 87, the director learns that she originally came from a Jewish family. In 1944/45 she had to hide for months in a barn in eastern Slovakia, while a large part of her family perished in the German extermination camps.

She keeps all this to herself, starts a family, becomes the first female professor of chemistry in the young socialist Czechoslovakia. She even hides the secret from her daughters.

In his second solo work, Boris Nikitin goes in search of his grandmother's silence. His family history is transformed by a new chapter and with it his own biography and identity.

In his critically acclaimed and internationally touring play "Versuch über das Sterben" (Attempt on Dying), Nikitin dealt with the act of comingout, the breaking of silence. Now he himself enters the stage again and looks at the silence in front of it.

"The text is just twenty pages long. And yet it contains a whole century." – Nürnberger Nachrichten

"Because no one hears anyone else say anything, nobody says anything. In this apparent tautology, he captures the manipulative power of surveillance states, documentation technologies and collectives." – Süddeutsche Zeitung