Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe

They deal with love, the search for happiness, and temptation by the devil — with hope, fate and trauma. Like bookends, wars repeatedly mark breaks in the narrative, both ending one story and beginning the next:

just after the Second World War, a baby is left in a nunnery and grows up there, only to leave the young Federal Republic for Paris as soon as she is old enough. When she has twins herself, a fortune teller foresees her doom in a tarot deck, and advises her to give away the children. Shortly after the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed end of the Cold War, a West German couple spends Valentine’s Day in Baden-Baden. Because you’re allowed to smoke inside the casino, this is where the wife ends up; she promptly discovers a passion for games of chance, and gambles away her family’s inauspicious heritage.

A soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder tells his therapist about losing his most faithful comrade during a mission in Afghanistan — a service dog, his closest companion and yet, from the military’s perspective, in case of emergency a mere piece of equipment. And shortly before the outbreak of the Russian war of aggression on Ukraine, a gay couple wants to fulfil its wish for a child by using a surrogate.

Robert Lepage was born in Québec in 1957, where he still lives today. With productions for theatre, opera, circus and film, he has been one of the world’s most important contemporary storytellers and theatre makers for more than three decades. In 2022, FIND dedicated its focus to him and showed the legendary production »The Seven Streams of the River Ota« and his highly acclaimed solo »887«. With »Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe«, he develops and stages a production with the Schaubühne ensemble for the first time.