h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Went to see a play last night. One of our friends was in it - it wasn't a professional affair, but not really amateur dramatics either.

It was really three plays, but by the end you did see a few links between them.

Apparently it was about partnerships and relationships. All rather confusing.

First we saw a couple on a bench. In the course of their conversation, you slowly got that they were porn actors and had obviously been making films together for years. They kept getting interrupted by a ditsy old lady who was waiting for her lover (presumably she was living in the past) She was convinced he was coming to see her but there had been a storm and she spent the whole play debating whether to move a branch that had fallen on the path he would be coming along.

Then the lights went on to the left-hand side of the stage where a group of 4 men were celebrating the marriage of one of their number. The others were apparently all bachelors and all trying to give something up.

The third section of the stage was a story about a group of women who were in a hotel to meet a CEO of an Italian company with whom they were going to merge. The most senior of the ladies had been exchanging increasingly intimate e-mails with this guy and was interpreting the word on multiple levels.

The three scenes never actually came together, but there were more and more allusions to one or the other of the other scenes as the play proceeded.

So it got convoluted and spanned the whole gamut between surrealism and pantomime, with a bit of kitchen sink thrown in.

They put a lot of work into it, and there was a helluva lot of dialogue, but it wasn't really what I would expect of a Sunday evening's entertainment.

Was it in German or English? Has the playwright written anything well-known?

[Amy P]

Sounds as if there was a lot of cock and bull to it.

Fascinating. Reminds me a bit of an evening I went to a few years ago, where the amateur company put on an Aristophanes play followed by two plays that they wrote themselves, so it was an eclectic mix, but very interesting and impressive if not as entertaining as more famous and modern works.

The playwright is German. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresia_Walser
The wiki entry is not available in English.

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresia_Walser