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HYSTERIA

The world is ending. And it’s happening at table 9…

TOTAL THEATRE AWARD at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2006

“Beautifully observed … wonderfully witty … I laughed until I cried” (The Guardian)

Inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name, Hysteria makes us witnesses to a painstaking attempt at social interaction. A man and a woman are on the most awkward dinner date of their lives. He is an academic whose research into modern day neuroses is threatening his sanity, she is an events manager who’s terrified of missing the party. Caught in the middle is their mortified waiter. With humour, physicality and visceral sound and lighting, Hysteria draws its audience into a world where the main course is a fight for survival and a banana can move you to tears.

Hysteria premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival 2006 where it won a Total Theatre Award and was shortlisted for the Carol Tambor Award.

Inspector Sands is a collective of award-winning theatre-makers with a body of acclaimed work between them. Hysteria is a co-production with Stamping Ground Theatre whose A Quiet Afternoon received rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe 2004 and on its UK and Irish Tours.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men

based on the short stories by David Foster Wallace

Brief_Interviews This compilation of dialogues and monologues delves into men´s fear of truly being seen or understood. The loneliness, aggression, and rawness of the characters are laid bare by a series of short interviews conducted by a silent female figure. Movement and visual passages disrupt the text to highlight suppressed motives.

Should we be witnessing this? How is the seemingly harmless partially loaded?

“… the inability to make another feel what it´s like to be unable to make another feel.” David Foster Wallace

Sexual Perversity in Chicago

by DAVID MAMET

Karen_01_web

a funky play for the singles generation

Two men and two women inthe dating pool, or the rise and fall of Danny and Deborah – a play about people around 30 trying to make sense of their lives.

“Language was invented to hide our feelings.” Voltaire

The first perversity is the fact that we never stop talking. Followed by the second one – that we are not really talking to each other but to ourselves. The third perversity is an obvious one – the never-ending search for the other half, the lonelines that comes with it, and that at some point we become addicted to the search. That´s why there are bars, make up and pornography. The fourth and final perversity is the strong belief that eventually we will succeed and be able to leave it all behind.

The proof that all this is true lies in the fact that things are still the same as they were when Mamet´s Sexual Perversity in Chicago first came out in 1974, a time when we thought we would be able to turn the world upside down – and we did.

New Political Plays

Staged readings of new politicals plays by Mary Brown (Australia) and Karen Malpede (USA)

March 30: Australian Gothic by Mary Brown

examining the tensions between civil liberties and national security from Hitler´s 1933 Enabling Act to recent introduction of new national security laws in Australia.

winner of the 2006 Max Afford Award and the 2006 Griffin Award

March 31: Prophecy by Karen Malpede

a drama of Americans and Palestinian-Lebanese whose lives are bracketed by wars in Vietnam, Lebanon and Iraq.

Dead Fred

a Road Play by Günther Grosser & Priscilla Be

SHOW-Renate+Fred Fred is dead but he´s not done talking. Anna is fed up with her stinky life in the East. Jens and Andreas are on the look-out for unsuspecting capitalist slobs. Edna is in the bathroom without a clue. The Royal Insults are on their way to fame without a map.

Dead Fred tells the story of a day in the lives of nine people on the `Transitstrecke´ – the transit road – through East Germany – a day they will never forget.

A grotesque comedy for those who´ve been there – and for those who´ve only heard about it. LA Crash meets Thelma without Louise in Michendorf. Fear and Loathing on the Transitstrecke – and the puzzling place afterwards.

The Promised Land

The Promised Land is the unfulfilled dream of belonging, of finding one´s true home. The play addresses this dream through a look at a relationship seen through juxtaposing their last day together, with the day of their first encounter.

Tick My Box!

tickmybox4_300lpi Blind Date meets Blue Velvet.

How do you get to meet that really special someone in the fast and impersonal modern-day world?… Welcome to Speed Dating; the three-minute mating game for the curious, the desperate and the deranged.

Birds do it, bees do it, even scary psychopaths do it…

Tick My Box! follows the adventures and misadventures of a room of hopeful singletons; some get on, some get drunk, some get lucky…one gets stalked!

An unflinching look at the dark side of love.

Iseult Golden and Carmel Stephens play a mesmerizing number of characters under the deft direction of David Horan.

Photo: Niall O’Riordan

Kanadiana

testing the waters – KANADIANA presents staged readings of Quebec and Canadian dramatists:

Naked West by Michael Grenn – Directed by Virginia Preston / Brokered Body Lab (Montreal + Berlin)
Table Talk by Deborah Pearson – Direcetd by Deborah Klein
Cheech, or The Chrysler Guys are in Town by Francois Létourneau – Directed by Robert Chevara

cureated by Virginia Preston / Brokered Body Lab (Montreal + Berlin)
DJ Scarlettjohansen

supported by the Canadian Embassy

Salome

based on the play by Charles L. Mee

“This is where we live, in the lush, disorderly fullness of the flesh.”

ETB_Salome_Web Salome, the woman who asked for the head of John the Baptist, is set in a modern world of sexual transgression and murder. Three women encompass different archetypes that offer insight into Salome´s complex corridors of desire, sexuality, femininity and violence. They unveil a collection ofg paradoxes that provides no definitions.

Like Mee´s Salome which also used excerpts from feminist theorists and writers, text and thoughts and images have been included from Catherine Millet, Camille Paglia, Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir, Nancy Sinatra, Florence Anthony, Evard Munch, Aubrey Beardsley, and Oscar Wilde.

Photo: Uwe Lauterkorn