Roland Schimmelpfennig

A summer evening. In a house by a lake. The parlour. On the stage, a group of people in dripping-wet summer clothes and shoes. MARION, an affluent woman in her late fifties, her somewhat younger partner GUNTER, Marion’s son from her first marriage CHRISTIAN, early to mid twenties, and her guests, the couple ERICH and SUSANNE, both doctors in their fifties or a little younger, and their daughter, TANJA, a similar age to CHRISTIAN.
MARION Wet – soaking wet. What a bummer!
A short pause.
What a bummer!
GUNTER I can’t do anything –
MARION Yes you can! Take it off, we have to take it off.
Disgusting!

From the very beginning, themes such as guilt, neglect, regret and failure to give in played a role in my thoughts about the play. Great themes for the stage, as tragic as they are comic. The play, as far as I dare say at this early stage, is the sketch of bourgeois life and bourgeois derailment. Today. A house by a lake. A summer evening… A night-time boat trip was planned, but there’s something wrong with the boat, it will sink later or at least fill up with water. That might be the beginning of the play: everyone is soaking wet.
No complaints, no laments, little reflection, no Ibsen. No living-room fight. Rather, a fragmented play that is fast, complex, sometimes ‘well built’, sometimes concentrated on what is absolutely essential, a play that nevertheless focuses on the characters and their situation. A nervous atmosphere. High tempo. Massive damages. Possible working title: The Leak. (Roland Schimmelpfennig, 8 December 2006)