Anna Schäfer - SCHLAFENDE HUNDE

What doesn't happen during a wild, sleepless night? Marie, the central character in Anna Schäfer's new and electrifying solo show, knows the feeling. Like so many people, she can't sleep because she can't switch her thoughts off. So every night, all those strange and wildly funny ideas bubble up - the ones she's always wanted to share with friends, enemies, and the world at large.

In a fast, layered, musical and sharply witty monologue, Anna Schäfer takes aim at the heart of our times. She acts, sings and spins through the big themes that affect her and us alike. She switches characters at breakneck speed, sketching a portrait of our country and its people that is as current as it is fantastical and satirical. Personal, political, pointed, and driven by sheer joy of performance. A headlong journey between theatre, cabaret, comedy and storytelling.

An evening about the stories we tell ourselves and each other. The stories that are our lives.

An evening that will leave no one cold.

"In the first half, Anna Schäfer uses her comedic and cabaret talent to hold up our zeitgeist-soaked social life to the light - pushed so far into the absurd that it becomes recognisable as a mistake. 'Under the weight of reality', everything we think is so great comes crashing down: the fashionable posturing, the compulsive drive toward superficiality, toward fun and distraction, the chase for recognition, glamour and success.

In the second half of this remarkable piece, Schlafende Hunde by Dietmar Jacobs, Anna Schäfer reveals her impressively wide-ranging and precise acting craft, and her warmth: in a shift that leads into existential depth. She brings the light and the heavy together. Even as everything remains play, a hard truth moves to the centre: life is a run toward death. We have known this since Dante's Divine Comedy. And how urgently we need it"