Almost all kind of neuroses are stripped on the polished surface in this absurd Austrian crime comedy which was performed for the first time at the Münchner Kammerspiele. It is a bizarre play based on Marcel Duchamp’s epitaph: “By the way it’s always the others who die”. Mysteriously the play also manages to fuse a risqué-melancholic keynote with David Lynch, Alfred Hitchcock and Jaques Tati. Corinna is the chief surgeon and is moving away from her flat to go to Peru and join the Médecins Sans Frontières. During her manic house-cleaning the curious landlord Joachim Hufschmied visits to go over the lease. During an intense talk about the urge to travel, life and death, his sharp eyes discover something baffling – a toe in the corner of the flat. Has Corinna cut her beloved Marcel, who was to come with her to Peru, into pieces? In her despair Corinna goes to see her mother, Mechtild, who gives her neither attention nor empathy. The mother is a dedicated biologist who would rather analyse the photosynthesis than her daughter’s problems. Desperately Corinna asks her mother to get the toe in the old flat – the only thing tying her to the past. In the third act the landlord surprises the mother as she is searching for a Peruvian death mask in the daughter’s old flat. The flat is now in awful decay but Mechtild and Joachim get closer to each other in an odd pas de deux.
