This is a house where no one could believe anyone would live
Not because of nature,
but because of human nature
and its mountains and valleys, and poor connections
Marthas Hus is a nightmarish haunted house, plagued by bourgeois love stories, expectations, and repetitions from times past. Here we meet the pathetic sadist Helmut (played by Josephine Kylén Collins in drag) and the jaded masochist Martha (Anna Ladegaard) – a couple trapped in a destructive relationship where love becomes both compulsion and longing.
The performance is inspired by Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film Martha (1974), Cornell Woolrich’s short story For the Rest of Her Life, and the concept of hauntology – the idea that ideals and dreams of the past never fully disappear, but continually haunt the present. With samples and references from film, literature, and theory, the house becomes a space where the boundaries between reality and illusion are blurred.
Marthas Hus is not only a tale of love’s darker sides, but also a politically charged commentary on our own time. The conservative wave shaping both global and Nordic societies appears as a ghost with poor taste and questionable family values. The performance explores how our own petty-bourgeois ideals – of dream homes, nuclear families, and control – can become suffocating, and asks: What happens when these ideals are taken to their extreme?
With dark humor and a cool unease, Marthas Hus invites reflection and self-examination. Some stories survive only when trapped between four walls – as echoes from the past, ready to haunt future generations.
This is a production where everything is so perfectly aligned; sound & lighting, insanely talented cast (Anna Ladegaard and Josephine Kylén Collins as Martha and Helmut) and the gorge velvet-y Lynchian set design and bourgie costumes by Tove Dreiman. Bravo everyone involved!
"Martha’s House" is an exciting example of how performing arts can, through amplification, evoke deep discomfort while keeping humor close at hand. That alone is an achievement well worth experiencing (…) It’s a challenge to create horror on stage, but here we witness some truly disturbing and well-crafted scenes, where Martha’s confined situation makes it hard to breathe.
● Olof Runsten is a Swedish theatre director and playwright who works with strong visual and spatial choreographies in collaboration with various artistic disciplines. He is behind productions such as The End of Books (2021) and Råttmånaden. In 2022, Bergfiktioner was presented at Black Box teater in Oslo, followed by Seasons in October 2024 – an audiovisual performance developed as a continuation of earlier projects. Marthas Hus premiered at Turteatern in Stockholm in March 2024 to rave reviews.
