Diebe

If life has to end with death, one should not ignore its funny side, is what Dea Loher may have thought to herself as she created such wrong-headed characters as the Schmitts. This middle class married couple are so afraid of anything and anyone they imprison themselves within their own four walls. Suddenly, however, a man appears in their flat and reminds a rather put-out Mr Schmitt that in his student years he was a regular sperm donor. Dea Loher collects a series of such comic catastrophes from failed lives in over thirty sharp scenes and weaves them into a tragicomic panorama. In Andreas Kriegenburg she has a congenial partner who shovels her human zoo off its treadmill and onto the stage. The characters then stand there and don’t really know whether it would be better to laugh or cry.