EVERYWOMAN
You ambush me in the prime of my life
and won’t grant me any delay?

DEATH
Hard luck. There’s no point crying or praying.
Your journey has to begin right now.

EVERYWOMAN
I can’t, not all alone.
Besides, you’re asking the impossible.
Some kind of human company
is necessary to cross this border!

What remains, what counts at the end of our lives? In Everywoman, a successful actress meets a woman who has been diagnosed with a lethal disease, whose last wish it is to perform one last time in a play. Starting with the allegorical morality play Jedermann about a righteous lifestyle and redemption through faith, an intimate conversation about the past and future ensues – about life, death, loneliness and community.

After Mitleid. Die Geschichte des Maschinengewehrs (2016), for which Milo Rau and Ursina Lardi travelled to the Congo together, and the production Lenin (2017), in which they used the last weeks in the life of the Russian revolutionary for an intense examination of the utopias of the 20th century, Milo Rau and Ursina Lardi have undertaken philosophical and existential research for Everywoman. What is death? Why this ultimate test – all alone? Why is there “nothing new to say about death”, as the play claims? And what might constitute a humane, an artistic answer to the scandalous fact of our common mortality?