Planet Earth is under attack from a deadly virus: the virus of loneliness. The epidemic leaves many people dead while whole countries are put in quarantine. For the cure of the sick ones, Institutes of Loneliness have opened all around the world. The end of the patient comes when the inner organs freeze to death. There is a legend that the dead ones end up in a snowy mountain, taken there by a spirit dressed in a white dress.

In the piece, the patients are carried in Berghof Sanatorium, the sanatorium where Thomas Mann’s ‘The Magic Mountain’ takes place.  The piece shows the daily schedule of the patients in this Institute. They take their medication and do exercises that will help them fight the virus. But their efforts are pointless. The disease is much stronger than any human effort or trick. In the end, Loneliness triumphs.

The Institute of Global Loneliness is a piece where the real and the artificial are continuously mixed together. The actors of blitztheatregroup act as the patients of the Institute who, in their turn, act as actors. They have to learn texts by heart and enact them with their fellow patients in the hope that these warm words that were borrowed from a book will help them feel something, will wake them up emotionally and help them warm up their internal world that’s frozen as a result of the disease. They try to fall in love using someone else’s words, they try to connect using literature, unable as they are to invent their own words and ways of connecting.

“Ideas about time were different up here from those ordinarily held about the length of stay at the baths, or at an ordinary cure. The smallest unit of time, so to speak, was the month, and a single month was almost no time at all.”

“A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries.

...Now, if the life around him, if his own time seem to be at bottom empty of such food for his aspirations; if he privately recognizes it to be hopeless, viewless, helpless, opposing only a hollow silence to all the  questions man puts, if the age one lives in affords no satisfying answer to the  eternal question of “Why?” “To what end?”, then one must be equipped with a moral solitude and single-mindedness which is rare indeed and of heroic mould ”

Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain