Search results for ""Author Roland Schimmelpfennig""

A savage satire on the rapacious nature of office lives and lusts - the British debut from a writer whose work has been seen in prestigious theatres all over Germany. Everyone wants to get to the executive suite. Everyone wants the Delhi job. Everyone wants sex, everyone wants love. So, they push for it. Roland Schimmelpfennig's play Push Up was first performed at the Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz, Berlin, in November 2001. It was premiered in this English translation by Maja Zade at the Royal Court Theatre, London, in February 2002.

Read more less

"A highly original and often hypnotic work . . . exactly the type of book that readers in search of striking European voices should embrace" John Boyne, author of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMASA contemporary Berlin fairy tale that bristles with urban truths - the first novel of Germany's best-known contemporary playwright One clear, ice-cold January morning shortly after dawn, a wolf crosses the border between Poland and Germany. His trail leads all the way to Berlin, connecting the lives of disparate individuals whose paths intersect and diverge. On an icy motorway eighty kilometres outside the city, a fuel tanker jack-knifes and explodes. The lone wolf is glimpsed on the hard shoulder and photographed by Tomasz, a Polish construction worker who cannot survive in Germany without his girlfriend. Elisabeth and Micha run away through the snow from their home village, crossing the wolf's tracks on their way to the city. A woman burns her mother's diaries on a Berlin balcony. And Elisabeth's father, a famous sculptor, observes the vast skeleton of a whale in his studio and asks: What am I doing here? And why? Experiences and encounters flicker past with a raw, visual power, like frames in a black and white film. Those who catch sight of the wolf see their own lives reflected, and find themselves searching for a different path in a cold time. This first novel of Germany's most celebrated contemporary playwright is written in prose of tremendous power and precision. Translated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Read more less

Text in English & German. Photographs of a huge building site, taken by night, show a bewildering world of machines, boards, cables and scaffolding, seemingly in total chaos and with mud and puddles everywhere. The viewer's gaze enters dim underworlds that look like a modern equivalent of Piranesi's Carceri. Behind clearly structured, transparent façades we can see office workers, politicians, hotel guests and laboratory staff. We can see what they are doing and how they interact with one another. Both everyday work and private business are on public display. The figures' various social roles are revealed by their body language, clothing and attributes. In contrast to the kind of voyeuristic view through a window we see in Alfred Hitchcock's famous film Rear Window (1954), the glass façade freely reveals what the classic perforated façade hides. Like the propaganda images turned out by totalitarian systems, the vastness of advertising spaces turns our usual sense of proportions on its head. Monumentally large, usually female human figures dwarf houses and people. They look down on the city's inhabitants from above. No passerby can evade their gaze or their attractions. Taken together, the photographs in this book represent a visual commentary on our present day lifestyle. All the pictures were taken in the centre of Berlin -- but the same scenes can be seen all over the world. The buildings are just as interchangeable as the monumental images of sex and consumerism. Stefan Koppelkamm's photographs are accompanied by selected monologues from Roland Schimmelpfennig's drama Push Up 1--3, which give the "ideal inhabitants" of this world a voice. These are people who fully subscribe to the images of success and beauty taken from adverts and from the media.

Read more less

A thrilling, filmic immersion into Berlin's legendary club scene - a skillfully told novel about the fragility of life.Berlin, Görlitzer Park: The body of a young woman in a white wedding dress floats in the canal. Who is she, and where does she come from? Suspended drugs investigator Tommy trawls Berlin's clubs and criminal clans to uncover the woman's story.On his odyssey through the city, he meets survivors and fighters, the lost and stranded from all over the world: from the Japanese tattoo master to the Indian fire-eater. Wide awake and dead tired, suspended between a dreamscape and reality, Tommy dives deeper and deeper into the Berlin underworld and into his own past. A breathless noir novel that is as hard-hitting as it is emotional, exploring the fragility of life and our longing for community.PRAISE FOR One Clear, Ice-cold Morning at the Beginning of the Twenty-first Century"A highly original and often hypnotic work . . . exactly the type of book that readers in search of striking European voices should embrace" John Boyne (author of THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PYJAMAS), Irish Times"A brilliantly kaleidoscopic morality tale"- Eileen Battersby, Financial Times"A magnificent achievement, a novel of terrific originality" - Charlie Connelly, New European"The exhilarating narrative is wonderfully concise, and the imagery is intensely cinematic" - Barry Forshaw, GuardianTranslated from the German by Jamie Bulloch

Read more less

Christmas Eve. Bettina and her husband Albert aren’t happy. Bettina’s mother is staying for the holidays. Which is awkward. Not least because Bettina’s mother met a man on the train. And now she’s invited him around for drinks... Family, betrayal and the inescapable presence of the past reverberate through the UK premiere of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s razor-sharp comedy.

Read more less