Hidde leads the audience to his secret favourite place: a cellar that only he and his big brother Jeppe know about. For years, Hidde has spent every spare minute in this basement room, because this is where his insect laboratory is.
The young audience can experience first-hand how Hidde lovingly feeds snails, grasshoppers and a wide variety of beetle species, measures them, observes them and experiments with them. But then Jeppe comes and disturbs, because now he wants to practice drums in the cellar. A quarrel begins and threatens to escalate, because the older boy is serious about what he wants to do since he gets to be a member of a cool band.
Because the basement must remain secret, Hidde can't ask his mother for help. She lives more like a shadow in the house anyway and is rarely responsive. Since Hidde and Jeppe's third brother Ward died three years ago, nothing has been the same in the family that Hidde likes to compare to an ant colony. The three of them live side by side, but no longer with each other.
Now Hidde pins all his hopes on Lieke, the beautiful girl from his class who loves butterflies and has only ever been observed by him from afar. Will she be able to help him defend his lab? And what is the secret that the brothers refuse to reveal at any price?
Spinnerling is a touching story about dealing with the loss of a loved one, told with both lightness and experimentation. The novel grew out of a play for an actor and many insects, and won the Gouden Griffel Prize in the Netherlands in 2013.
House director Sara Ostertag brings Hyde's insect lab to life with imagination for young audiences, sensitively telling the story of two brothers who love and fight, who have become lonely in their grief, and yet find each other again in the end.
Text source and more event information:
http://www.staatstheater-mainz.com/web/veranstaltungen/justmainz-16-17/spinnerling
