Award-winning Luxembourg performance-maker Larisa Faber (stark bollock naked, Assembly Roxy; 340x, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe, Germany) will be premiering two new shows in London this Autumn based on her Eastern European upbringing – The Land We Shared and White Gold.
The Land We Shared uniquely blends documentary theatre and live music to uncover the complex layers of grief and historical memory. The show unpacks how the long shadow of Romania’s communist dictatorship continues to shape lives across generations.
Your grandmother’s burial became the seed for this whole show. What was the moment you realised that image was actually the start of a play?
I’d wanted to make a show about my grandmother for some time, but didn’t know which part of her life to focus on. After her burial, I found a plastic bag of newly bought clothes she’d prepared. On top of them she’d put a hand-written note: “Burial Clothes”. That discovery made me question whether I’d been the grand-daughter she deserved and sparked the initial image for the show.
The giant cabbage becomes a symbol for your family’s history. How did something so ordinary end up carrying that much weight on stage?
Cabbage is queen in Romanian cuisine. Cabbage rolls are the nation’s favourite. Christmas: cabbage rolls. Easter: cabbage rolls. Auntie’s birthday: cabbage rolls. It’s a simple, versatile vegetable that needs a lot of time and skill to be pickled and turned into a roll. It’s a neat little metaphor for the show and it’s also quite fun and a bit ridiculous. There’s lots of dark humour in the show. There’s a cabbage transformation, a cabbage riddle and an ode to cabbage rolls. Its green colour is a through-line: something toxic, that permeates everything. Also, Vogue Magazine elected the humble cabbage veggie of the year 2026. Prophetic?
You’re telling a father, daughter and grandmother’s story through your own family, but casting other actors to play them. What was it like watching someone else become your grandmother?
The show is auto-fiction. I needed to let the real people go and write the characters the show needed. Casting other actors (who are all more or less the same age) to play these characters, helped create a useful distance. It gave me the necessary freedom to explore relationships, rather than being shackled to what really happened. I also wanted them to be similar in age – the age I’m at now – because these characters aren’t in black/white, from some distant past, disconnect from us. They could be your mates, now.
The show is described as funny despite dealing with dictatorship and grief. Where did you find the humour in material that heavy?
There’s always been lots of dark humour in Eastern Europe. It’s a coping mechanism. When you’ve got no freedoms and nothing in your fridge, either, it’s better to laugh than to cry. Humour is also a gateway into a situation people might otherwise not be interested to engage with. One character says: “To joke is to disarm.”
You developed this at Summerhall and toured it across Europe before it lands in the UK. Has the show changed shape as different audiences met your grandmother’s story?
I was lucky to develop it in various countries and venues at different stages. With each sharing, I handed out feedback forms. It helped me gauge whether audiences connected with the story, regardless of their historical knowledge of Romania. The biggest change is possibly that I initially pitched it as a one-woman suitcase show. It’s a 3 hander with a full drum kit, double bass, rotating platform and massive cabbage.
Communist Romania shaped your family in ways that outlived the regime itself. What’s something you inherited from that history that you didn’t recognise until you started writing this?
That I was capable of writing it. It took some time to let the real people go and to accept certain aspects of reality. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I couldn’t talk about Eastern Europe without crying of rage. It was a bit mad. It was very personal, even though Ukraine isn’t my country and nothing is happing to me or mine. But I felt this strong sense of history repeating. That all these people behind the Iron Curtain had lived through those dictatorships for nothing. That we hadn’t learned anything, frighteningly. I realised I needed to get a grip, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to engage with the topics of the show.
The Land We Shared is heading to Artsdepot on Thursday 15th October 2026, tickets available here: https://www.artsdepot.co.uk/event/the-land-we-shared/
White Gold will run at Camden People’s Theatre from 25th-28th November 2026, tickets available here: https://cptheatre.co.uk/whatson/White-Gold