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.

 

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; perhaps it´s Berlin. All six are in search of a niche, a home, a relationship. No catastrophes take place, and no one is evil, yet they all fail in their quest and eventually end up alone: a chain of wasted chances.

That´s just how it is - shit happens.

Here is an example: Chance has it that a woman who met a man through the Internet and already had a promising first date with him notices that very man sitting in a bar with another woman minutes before the second eagerly-awaited date. What she doesn´t know is that this other woman is the man´s ex who just came to say goodbye for good. Our woman misconstrues their tête-à-tête and walks away, disillusioned.

In fifty-four scenes – some of them just very short clips – Alan Ayckbourn masterfully creates an atmosphere of melancholy and failure. His warm look at the characters keeps schadenfreude and black humour at bay and instead makes us smirk at 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.

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.