Sabine Harbeke

“A summer day in the old garden. The children, long grown up and independent, meet – ‘mother wanted it like this’… the place of their childhood is a place of mixed feelings. Their father’s early death – Matthias found him and couldn’t help – is a heavy burden, and a year ago, the mother died. A classical-contemporary family story. Sabine Harbeke… recounts the summer day, the mundane, unspectacular very precisely, nearly documentary-like. … In the dialogues, the Swiss author captures the moods and anxieties between the siblings, hints at the things that happened without having to go on about them. … Theatre as a mirror of reality – that has the potential to cause boredom. But Harbeke wins the game by listening precisely, by using the immediacy of theatre, because wünschen hilft is psychologically coherent.” (Südkurier)

“The eerie small family returns in stark distortions. … The original, imagined family and the contemporary, distorted one: in this rift, the family meeting of those people between their late twenties and mid-thirties oscillates. And Sabine Harbeke manages to show this rift masterfully, because the play is unspectacularly precise and yet light.”
(Neue Zürcher Zeitung)