My name is ERLING, Erling, Hug, My name is Erling

Dear child has many names!

On Friday, my play Mein name ist Erling premieres in Hamburg, at the Winterhuder Fährhaus Theater and as a playwright I enjoy the sudden luxury of being able to travel there plus two hotel nights – paid! I'm taking a good friend with me, who also speaks fluent German.

It is of course fantastic fun that people at this well-known theater have found and become attached to my play, and I have the publisher in Berlin to thank for that, Ulrike Hoffman. I have not crossed two straws for this fun, it came as a surprise.

Erling, or My name is Erling I originally wrote for the radio theater and Peter Schildt directed. The initiative was Gerd Hegnell's and Per Oscarson's, they wanted me to write a piece for them and the idea was that they had a love story when they were young.

To be asked by these wonderful actors was very honoring but I couldn't come up with anything other than fairly conventional ideas like yes, they have had a love story and in the old days they meet again. Men … since then?

Fast one day, when me and my ex-husband were on a years-delayed honeymoon trip to Amsterdam and I discovered for the first time that beer could be good and now lay in a bathtub with my ex-husband and didn't think at all, then the idea came. And so it often is. The ideas come when we are not chasing them. They just kind of fall down, melts into one, like a snowflake, in the moments when you have no defense, or any effort of thought and will.

The idea was quite strange, but you also don't need to have answers to everything when you write. No one has all the answers!

Quite short, Erling is the child they dreamed of together when they were in love, a symbol of their desired future together and the love they then never lived, and all the cozy moments they never had with the dream child. Men, as so often, they did not leave the dream, although in every way they left each other. And as so often, have they nurtured the dream, protected it, hid it and had it as his refuge. ”Där, with THEM I would be much more loving, much more present, much more open, more fun, warmer”, type.

Sometimes incomprehensible things happen. And the dreamed becomes body! Thirty years later. Ett mirakel!

Now the two are standing , who long ago loved each other, but for various earthly reasons opted out of each other, before the materialized dream; Erling.

What will happen? Ja, you have to see the play to get an answer to that.

Erling, in reality, was a white bull calf that I took care of when I was quite young. He followed me everywhere and he understood when I was sad, just like dogs do. Then he came and buffed me with his smooth mule. He had big brown eyes, long eyelashes and white fur with beige spots. When it rained, I put a raincoat over him and sometimes we even cuddled in the grass. When he was two years old, he was a badass with dangerous horns. In his smallest movement there was such force that one could be knocked over. But he came to me when I called out and pressed his forehead against me, stayed with me for so long, we together, man and bull.

Then he was transported to the slaughterhouse. But the farmer had spared him an extra long time. Very sad. He was a miracle. Like all other animals. Which we use in different ways, without perceiving …. the miracle.

I have seen the play Erling in Spain, German, Uruguay and Colombia. It has also been played in France and Brazil. It is very exciting to sit in the audience and follow the reactions. There is a lot of laughter. Det är meningen. Men sedan, suddenly , sadness falls down, the pain and the sadness, the realization of how bad we are at actually expressing love, act in love and be in our now. Afterwards, people rush home, reawakened in their appreciation of what they have in their lives, which they forget to see, forget to even perceive. As it is for all of us.

At the premiere in Montevideo, Uruguay, a famous psychologist told me that I had managed to describe life's big questions in an hour with this strange story. ”Jaha?” I said surprised. But then I thought about it a bit and yes, maybe that's right.

But that happens best when you don't look for it. I don't think the story would have been possible if I had thought in advance that I had to write something about life's big questions in a single hour. That's not how it works.