Unsere Zeit (Our Time)

Ödön von Horváth is rightfully regarded as the leading diagnostician of his time. In every line that Horváth mostly placed in the mouths of petty bourgeois or women dependent on the patriarchy, Klaus Mann found an «atmosphere of genuine poetry». Horváth’s plays, novels and short stories, which carry strong biographical references to Munich, are precise socio-political analyses of a radically alienated and socio-economically unstable society that is standing on the edge of the abyss and contains numerous gaping chasms within itself.

The Australian playwright and director Simon Stone whose attention-grabbing contemporary interpretations of classic dramas have caused an international sensation, takes characters, narrative threads and motifs from Horváth’s works, catapults them into the present day and weaves them together into a touching, post-heroic panorama of human effort in times of crisis.

In the microcosm of a gas station, a public place where people are in transit and contrasting social strata meet, we observe snapshots of fifteen characters – from a parcel delivery man to a CEO to a social worker – and over a period of several years become witnesses of their personal desires, individual blows of fate, psychic wounds, political positions and economic pressures. Using the poetry of everyday speech, Simon Stone achieves a thoroughly contemporary homage to Horváth's work of fortune hunters and the left behind, social climbers and drop outs, daydreamers and those caught up in their worst nightmare – and a theatrical analysis of our age.