Mayenburg: Three Plays

Eldorado: Anton’s got it made: dream house, artistic wife, baby on the way. And, as the smoke rises from another city saved by coalition bombs, there’s a fortune to be made rebuilding the wreckage. So what’s he doing forging his boss’s signature? And why has his wife crushed her hands under the piano lid? Painfully funny scenes of married bliss in meltdown and the insistent presence, on their screens and in their dreams, of the West’s far-flung and half-forgotten wars - Eldorado asks what happens when the drive for success carries us past our coping point.

Perplexed: Taking inspiration from Pirandello’s Six Characters in Search of an Author, as well as the pens of Stoppard, Nietzsche and Beckett, influential writer Marius von Mayenburg has created a fast-paced and very funny piece of contemporary absurdism. The four actors play musical chairs with their characters in an astonishing tumble of scenes. Their characters are patchwork individuals, groping for assurance and security in a constantly disintegrating reality, while slipping on the metaphysical banana peels von Mayenburg throws in their path. A comedy about the capriciousness of reality, one’s own identity, and the theatre itself.

The Dog, The Night and the Knife: A nightmarish flight through a city, in which all men and women have striking similarities: policeman and doctor, criminal and lawyer, patient and nurse. And all of them are after M. Just as the night seems done, and dawn is coming, M faces the irrevocable choice between dangerous love with a zombie, and the lonely hunt with a dog.

Marius von Mayenburg studied mediaeval literature in Munich and Berlin, and playwriting at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 1998 he began a collaboration with Thomas Ostermeier at the Baracke at Deutsches Theater in Berlin and, from 1999, at Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin. He was awarded the Kleist Prize for young dramatists for his first play Fireface (1997) and the Frankfurt Writer’s Foundation Prize (1998). His plays have been translated into over thirty languages and performed both in Germany and abroad. Since 2009 he has directed several plays in Berlin and Munich. Alongside his activities as playwright, dramaturg and director, Mayenburg has translated plays by Sarah Kane, Martin Crimp and William Shakespeare.

Maja Zade studied at London University, Queen’s University in Canada and at RADA. She was Senior Reader at the Royal Court Theatre in London from 1997-99. She is a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin, where she has worked with directors such as Thomas Ostermeier, Katie Mitchell, Ivo van Hove, Luk Perceval, Benedict Andrews and Marius von Mayenburg. Her translations into German include works by Lars von Trier and Caryl Churchill, and she has translated works by Roland Schimmelpfennig and Lars Norén into English.