by Alan Ayckbourn

Directed by Werner Gerber

Set and Costumes: Tomas Fitzpatrick / Lights: Katri Kuusimäki / Sound: Torsten Litschko

with Lisa Meilen, April Small, Sabrina Ellenberger, Kevin McKinnon, Lee Stripe, Brian Loughnane

 

 

BOOK YOUR TICKETS ONLINE HERE.

 

 

 

"In all this, nothing is ever wholly tragic or totally comical. The comedy, like the intelligent directing, remains unflustered, unagitated. The characters' loneliness and their lamentable failure in matters of love require no dramatic embellishment. It's no more than is to be expected in the life of a typical big-city single. Yet the acting is so close to life itself that one develops a real affection for this sextet and feels sad to have to leave them after 100 minutes in their company."  Berliner Morgenpost (read the whole review HERE)

 

 

Any idiot can face a crisis. It’s the day-to-day living that wears you out.  Anton Chekhov

Six people in a big city. All of them are in search of a home, a niche or a relationship. No catastrophes take place, and no one is evil, yet they all fail in their quest and eventually end up alone. That´s just how it is - shit happens.

A chain of wasted chances – a comedy of failures.

For example: the first meeting of an internet date starts out embarrassingly – and ends in desaster. The longer the evening, the more alcohol gets drunk, and the sadder and more touching the meeting becomes. The very next day Dan, flowers in hand, goes to meet her again in a café. His former girl friend happens to be sitting in the same café and as they greet each other, his date misconstrues their tête-à-tête and walks away, disillusioned.

In fifty-four scenes – some of them just short clips – Alan Ayckbourn masterfully creates an atmosphere of exquisite melancholy and grotesque failure. His sympathetic view of the characters keeps schadenfreude and black humour at bay and instead makes us grin at the all-too-familiar situations from our own lives. With a keen humane eye, Ayckbourn finds a universal language for the impossible dream of fulfilled desires.

For his cinematic adaptation of the play, French director Alain Resnais transferred the story to Paris and through the title Coeurs offers a very simple idea of what the play is all about: the hearts are beating but the rhythm isn´t quite right….

We present the play in its English-language original and set it in Berlin as the new international metropolis – whose neuroses, however, remain global.

More about ALAN AYCKBOURN here.

all tickets 5€

 

TALKING HEADS

by ALAN BENNETT

directed by Günther Grosser

with Kim Eustice, Monica Solem, Jesse Inman

Set and Costumes: Tomas Fitzpatrick / Roland Ascheid  -  Lights: Katri Kuusimäki  - Video: Dargelos Kersten - Sound: Torsten Litschko

An ENGLISH THEATRE BERLIN production

Three people, three stories - and the abyss they have to face.

 

Here is what Jacinta Nandi has to say about the show in her EXBERLINER blog.   (" It´s fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking brilliant.")

 

plus a great review from EXPATICA.COM.

 

ENGLISH THEATRE BERLIN presents three pieces from Bennett´s brilliant and masterful TALKING HEADS, a series of poignant yet hilarious monologues peeling back the veneer of respectability to revel in - and of course laugh at - the private foibles of everyday life. These tales of loneliness and eccentricity range from hilariously funny to bitingly satirical to poignantly reflective, sometimes all in the same monologue. Alan Bennett wrote the first six pieces in the mid 80s for BBC-TV, where they became a huge success and received several prestigious awards. More than ten years later, another six monologues followed, and this time Alan Bennett confronted his protagonists with severer problems like murder, or a husband who is into S/M. English Theatre Berlin presents three of the later pieces: The Outside Dog, Playing Sandwiches and Nights in the Gardens of Spain.

 

Tickets 18 € / 10 € Students - book them HERE !

THE ART OF LOVE

SQUATTERS