Mayenburg: Three Plays

The first collection in English of plays by one of Germany’s most influential and widely produced playwrights.

The first collection in English of plays by Marius von Mayenburg, one of Europe's most influential and widely produced playwrightsEldorado: 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.