Heiden at Nationaltheater Mannheim

Marina and her husband Oleg live together with their 19-year-old daughter in humble circumstances. Marina works as an estate agent with only moderate success, Oleg is a musician and earns hardly anything to contribute to family life. One day Natalja Stepanowna, Oleg’s mother, comes to visit. She is a devout Christian, and is horrified at conditions in what she sees as a family without faith, and which has in her opinion fallen into moral decline. First she converts Bootsmann, a drunken neighbour whom the family have known for a long time, with her faith and uses this to persuade him to give up alcohol. By finding better paid work for Marina and Oleg, she manages to get them to emulate her in her fear of God. Only her granddaughter Kristina gives her cause for concern. The avowed agnostic sternly rejects every attempt by her grandmother to convert her and does not allow her to influence her lifestyle – she smokes, drinks and »whores« around. It is clear to Natalja that stubborn Kristina is possessed by demons. And that she allegedly needs to be exorcised. The priest, Father Wladimir, is supposed to help her with this?… Heathens looks at the subject of »belief« in a radical manner. What do we believe in and what allows us to believe or not to believe? What do our beliefs cause us to do, and what are non-believers guided by? Does belief even blind you from having plain common-sense?

29 year-old Ukrainian dramatist Anna Jablonskaja was considered the shooting star among Russian speaking playwrights and was one of the great hopes of Eastern European theatre, before she was tragically killed in a terror attack at the Moscow Domodedowo Airport on 24 January 2011. Heiden was her final stage play. She had written over a dozen plays before this.