Marthas Hus (postponed)

Welcome to Marthas Hus, a nightmarish haunted house, plagued by bourgeois love stories, expectations, and repetitions from times past. In this exorcistic baptism of fire you’ll meet the pathetic sadist Helmut and the jaded masochist Martha – a couple trapped in a destructive relationship where love becomes both compulsion and longing. With dark humour and cool unease, the work invites reflection and self-examination. Some stories survive only when trapped between four walls – as echoes from the past, ready to haunt future generations.

This theatre play is not only a tale of love’s darker sides, but also a politically charged commentary on our own time. The conservative wave shaping both global and Nordic societies appears as a ghost with poor taste and questionable family values. The performance explores how our own petty-bourgeois ideals – of dream homes, nuclear families, and control – can become suffocating, and asks: What happens when these ideals are taken to their extreme?

In the making of Marthas Hus theatre director and playwright Olof Runsten let himself be inspired by the highly regarded filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Martha from 1974, American novelist Cornell Woolrich’s short story For the Rest of Her Life, and the concept of hauntology. Hauntology being the idea that ideals and dreams of the past never fully disappear but continually haunt the present. With samples and references from film, literature, and theory, the house becomes a space where the boundaries between reality and illusion are blurred.