Radio Drama · 2026-08-13

Voice messages as two women's umbilical cord to life

socialdrama

Two women speak to each other only in voice messages, while an erroneous charge of 1.42 euros slowly becomes the emblem of losing control over their whole lives. Deutschlandfunk's new radio play was written and directed by two Berlin literary journalists.

A cancelled streaming subscription is charged anyway: 1.42 euros. That is the starting point. In Deutschlandfunk's new radio play, "dear algo, let me feed an apple to a horse", that small annoyance grows into the piece's central motif: what happens when every slice of life turns into a subscription, and it is no longer clear what we actually chose for ourselves.

The two characters, Thea and Walie, never speak in real time: the entire play consists of voice messages. Thea is worn down between motherhood and working from home in the bustle of a city flat, while Walie longs desperately for analogue quiet at a campsite in Brandenburg — only to end up staring again into the hypnotic blue glow of her phone. Both want to opt out and neither can detach; the play contains not a single minute the two spend in a shared scene, only recorded messages going back and forth. It is a portrait of two exhausted millennials talking about how control slips away in a world where things can no longer be acquired and kept, only subscribed to.

The play, with its two female characters, is credited to two young women writers: Paulina Czienskowski, a novelist, journalist and radio dramatist, and Julia Friese, a writer and culture journalist. The premiere will be on Deutschlandfunk.

Sources: Deutschlandfunk — the radio play's own page (2026-08-15) · German Wikipedia — Paulina Czienskowski (2026-08-13) · Wallstein Verlag — Julia Friese author page (2026-08-13)

AI involvement — Research: partly · Writing: partly · Verification: partly. The article is based on machine translation of original texts in German.

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