The last man on earth meets the last woman, but they will not live together. The year is 1960. Ten years after the end of the Second World War, the Third (world war) has succeeded (at last!) in decimating humanity. One man has survived. He travels all over Northern Germany by bicycle in search of solid and spiritual nourishment, visiting museums and warehouses and cursing mankind all the while. He builds himself a house, plants potatoes, and gathers together a small library (Poe, Fenimore Cooper, Tieck, Wieland, E.T.A Hoffmann) and a few paintings. However, he continues to write.

at the same time Ulysses and the Flying Dutchman, Don Quixote and Robinson Crusoe, he has a mystical and physical relationship with nature. Moon, alcohol,


seasons, moors and forests. Several worlds suddenly appear simultaneously. Objects speak, works of Art have survived. Behind today's desert lies yesterday's emotion.

But no sentimentality: THEY only got what THEY deserved!!! Besides, just think for a moment about the History of Humanity since Ancient Greece: Man has known for a long time how to do things but he preferred to wreck everything! And also, the last WOMAN (!) has just turned up

This play is dedicated to books. To those who write them and to those who read them.
To the books that accompany our whole life, which hand down life and protect memory. "To read a book is to take out a loan, Lichtenberg used to say. To understand it is to reimburse one's debt."
Why "do" theatre with literature, Boulgakov, Arno Schmidt? Why not simply stage plays? Because some literary texts instantly set the entire world ablaze. And because from this point on, we want to say everything, give everything, understand everything, express everything: all stories and all people.
And also because a text which is forced to confront the violence of the theatre without having been conceived for it may produce a mysterious poetic reaction, powerful and uncontrollable. Suddenly, the silence and the solitude of reading are broken by bursts of voices and lights. The text rings out. We want to hear nature and human words, breathe the wind and the sea, feel the heat of the sun on the road. From the flat universe of the book, a world in three dimensions springs out.
Arno Schmidt died in 1979. He wrote Miroirs noirs in 1951. In Germany, and all over Europe, the scars of war were still visible all over the cities. But people were already speaking of rearmament, and the Korean war was raging. Just after an enormous tragedy of hatred and destruction, all humanity was already engrossed in "the next one". Hence the fiction of a Third World War erasing every living thing in one blow. Almost fifty years later, we can safely say there is no risk of nuclear war in the near future. But why does the tone used by Arno Schmidt to address his contemporaries ring strangely true today? All those who have been wounded by human tragedy also have these accents of scorn or impotent rage in their voices. Fulminato cantabile, this is our score. But behind this façade of cynicism and this forced learning of solitude, we relentlessly scour the great book of the wonders of the world: the look of two people in love, the star catalogues of the ancients, the epic poems of Homer, the fables of E.T.A. Hoffmann. "On the eternal hunting grounds of the imagination, we need a story where Ulysses and the Flying Dutchman were one and the same character". And as for us, we continue to wander on this earth seeking beauty and knowledge. Robinson in the city, Don Quixote in the modern world. At least Ulysses, when meeting Cyclops, gives as his name: nobody.

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