Sabine Harbeke

Cancer-ridden Traute Held leaves her husband Erwin despite them loving each other. Rosa Malviani sells lipsticks on the street and gets engaged to the man who shot her years ago. Her David breeds budgies and desires Traute when he is supposed to sing a love song to her, commissioned by Erwin. And in her small refreshment stand, Vera Grodzki likes to make coffee for her loyal customer, car dealer Mr. Thiese – until he has too much luck.

“The characters in Sabine Harbeke’s play trortzdem have an urgent sense of their own temporality and try to obtain some last measure of leeway from life. Their stories touch and devour each other, and they become something like destiny for one another. Sabine Harbeke’s scenes are based on observations, imagined further, finely traced psychologically and densified atmospherically. The interest of the author is explicitly not maximum dramatic aggravation. Much more than that, it shows the detonation waves after the impact, the distant echoes of life's catastrophes, the brutality of the after. … Sabine Harbeke writes laconic, funny and deeply sad stories about brutal moments of pain: about failure, but also about the power to design a utopia in the hardest times of life and to never give up. Regardless."(Dietmar Böck, Theater heute Jahrbuch 2007)