Roland Schimmelpfennig

“Five unemployed actors stand in front of the old, red curtain after their theatre has closed.” “It needs no further explanation. It’s not important, it’s painful.” – That's how Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Keine Arbeit für die junge Frau im Frühlingskleid opens. It is about fragmented connections, about the imaginary or real stories of five actors. About theatre and theatre people. About “borrowed CVs”, perhaps, as was once said. Or, about life, memories and above all desire, which are presented in Schimmelpfennig’s writing like elaborate role plays. In Eric Rohmer’s films or in Botho Strauß’s early prose, there were similarly scattered conversations, puzzles, logical holes, absurdities. And a functional poetry of language.
The actors show up in pairs in these strange stories. They talk, they act as if in waking dreams. (…) There are always glitches in the concrete, flights into fantasy – apocalypse, hopes, they are madly talking at cross purposes. In the end, the older actress is engaged as Eliza Doolittle in New York and says goodbye. Her? She’s too old. “We’re not in the movies. Theatre would be completely impossible if you thought like that!”
(Ingrid Seidenfaden, Der Tagesspiegel on the world premiere at the Munich Kammerspiele on April 4, 1996)