Kangaroos by the Pool

Shutters drop like guillotines and crack like gunshots. In the big block of flats, people are holed up in their cave-like apartments. It’s hellishly hot outside, and a delivery driver (who until very recently used to be a horn player in an orchestra) brings them everything they need. One of the neighbours has committed suicide. One couple has just moved out – they got rich during the crisis and now live in a villa with kangaroos by the pool. Another couple toss and turn at night wondering why they are still together. Parents call for their missing child; a teacher suffers from burnout; others complain about supply shortages, or the increasing frequency of floods and gales; and perhaps the world as we know it has simply come to its natural end.

Theresia Walser condenses the many disasters of the present day – pandemic, climate change, wars – into a shimmering ‹fantasy of exhaustion and salvation about the state of the nation› (Theater der Zeit).
‹It is about people who are only rhetorically carrying on as if nothing had changed… But Walser’s text reveals that even death, which is omnipresent these days, is not necessarily the end.› (Die deutsche Bühne)
‹A play which cleverly combines envy, loneliness and fears about the future in a scathing comedy.› (BR)
‹Walser finds the comedy in forlornness and the forlornness in comedy… It is possible to laugh about people’s desperate efforts not to go mad. Which is liberating.› (Süddeutsche Zeitung)