Gilla Cremer shines in her solo “My Parents’ Things” – A journey through time to a childhood of the ‘60s

At the end, the table has stopped the conversation, the cutlery is silent. The objects have lost their tongue. They’re just objects now. Agnes has cleared out her parents’ belongings. Outside the front door, the container from the clearing-out service stands packed and ready to be moved. What’s left are memories.

Gilla Cremer is Agnes in her wonderful stage solo “My Parents’ Things” at Hamburg’s Kammerspiele theatre. Agnes is one of four sisters tasked with clearing out the house after the death of their parents. Three of the sisters have little time and soon have to leave to get back to their families, back to their jobs, and left is Agnes – and with her a house full of stories where her parents lived for 60 years and where the children grew up. A house where the objects start to speak.

On stage, there are countless cardboard boxes stacked in the form of a house, and an ornate floor lamp. Agnes has got herself a professional house clearing guide to help her systematically empty the house. “A good list makes everything easier,” she says, and starts to read out a furious monologue of all the items that are in the house. From the cellar to the loft. From the preserving jars – the oldest of which date back to 1964 – to the stone axe that her father used to rave about. Agnes has recorded that there are exactly 17,598 objects in the house, but how many things does one really need? “Two: the stone axe and the smartphone.”

Under the direction of Dominik Günther, Gilla Cremer manages to strike the right balance between touching and humorous moments. The objects tell Agnes little sometimes already forgotten stories – about the cuddle gap between the two mattresses in her parents’ bed that she as a little girl used to wangle her way into, about the “primordial mother scent” of the dressing gown that she loved so much, about the moment when Agnes asked her mother whether she believed in God and her mother replied, “No, I don’t believe in God, but I miss him.” And about her father’s strict rituals at the dinner table: “First chew, then swallow!”

Meanwhile, Gilla Cremer drags one cardboard moving box after the other out of the house and, in a highly visualized way, deconstructs the system of “family”. Until, in a last gesture of angry rebellion, Agnes knocks down the whole house of cardboard boxes with a kind of Nibelung sword. That’s what your feelings on this journey through time to a childhood in the ‘60s and ‘70s do: they wade through miry valleys, they fly over lofty heights. Family is something you have, friends are something you choose.

And Gilla Cremer takes the audience by the hand in every scene, many of whom know this biographical cut, have experienced and suffer it themselves: the death of their parents, clearing out their house, the deluge of emotions that comes gushing in from the past and catches you unawares. When simple objects – a mirror, a suitcase, a sewing machine – rekindle memories and start talking about the past.

“As always – let’s hope for the best” is what mother always said. The mother who died so suddenly and left her daughters a house full of old life. Gilla Cremer has turned this into a moving, bitterly humorous solo. (Hamburger Abendblatt / Volker Albers)