NO51 My wife got angry

What is real and what is faked in this playful critique of our contemporary visual culture ?

We are flooded with photographs and images. About how we should look, what ideal life is and how wonderful somebody else's journey was. All of them efforts to stop time for a fraction of a second or to share our most beautiful moments with others. But in our current obsession with images we lose sight of the difference between original and copy : we model our lives after advertising images and pretend to be better off than we are via selfies. But whose life is it anyway that we lead : ours or that of somebody else ? The starting point of My wife got angry may well be tragic, the way in which this piece is staged is quite humorous. The main character finds himself in a bizarre situation : he has lost all the photographs of the family trip to a tropical island and gets very upset about this. But suddenly help arrives out of the blue : a group of unknown volunteers helps him to recreate the photographs. More than 50 tableaux vivants are made live by the actors every evening and the photographs of them are projected on a screen beside them. Thus a double reality appears on stage. But what is real and what is faked ?

Theatre NO99 is the most well-known Estonian theatre group abroad. Producers Tiit Ojasoo and Ene-Liis Semper founded the company in 2005. Special is that they called their first production no.99 and have been counting down to zero since. Thus My wife is angry from 2014 is no.51, halfway in the oeuvre of this company, which will dissolve itself when all the numbers have been used. But before that happens, the Estonians are on an international conquest. My wife is angry was the very first Estonian performance that was selected for the Festival d'Avignon. Before that there was already a co-production with KVS and Münchner Kammerspiele. In 2010 they even put up a fictitious political movement making the whole of Estonia their stage. The majority of the population then thought that Unified Estonia was a real party and 7000 people showed up for their first party meeting. With Ash and money , Theatre NO99 made an intriguing documentary to reflect on this political stunt.