Serotonin

Florent-Claude Labrouste has steered his life into a dead end. Battered by failed relationships, humiliated by the impotence caused by anti-depressants, fed up with his life and full of contempt for himself and the world around him, he burns all his bridges. He is merciless in taking stock – on the basis, among other things, of the women in his life. Michel Houellebecq’s novel Serotonin is centred around a deeply frustrated, sad and mournful character. Sebastian Hartmann chooses a decisive and radical approach to this material: nothing distracts from the magnificent storytelling of Guido Lambrecht, whose nuanced, precise and restrained acting lends a voice and body to a man who is falling apart in this impressive solo. Something in between an installation, performance art and a theatre performance, Serotonin is a fascinatingly challenging road movie of inertia and an invitation to surrender oneself to the events on stage.  

Jury Statement

“Sebastian Hartmann has never presented such a radically reduced and purist production. His stage adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Sérotonine is a masterpiece of theatrical minimalism: it needs no more than a white box containing just a white wooden bench, a single spotlight and, of course, Guido Lambrecht. Lambrecht spends a good five hours lingering in this space whose whiteness seems to expunge anything else, laying before us the messed-up life of Houellebecq’s first person narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste. This merciless account of a failed man is repeatedly interrupted by a second, intra-German life story, that broadens and comments on Labrouste’s toxic view of the world. Meanwhile Lambrecht’s acting, as reticent as it is precise, is a minor theatrical sensation. It allows us to see inside one man’s gaping chasms and find the core of the anti-modern thinking so virulent right now.”
– Sascha Westphal for the Theatertreffen-jury

Tothe video statement (in German)

DigitalProgramme Booklet on the website of Hans Otto Theater (in German)