The third volume in the successful Theatre Café series contains three contemporary European plays in English translation. All fairly short two-handers, the plays make a great volume for teachers and students looking for suitable material to work on in schools, colleges, and youth theatre groups. The volume contains:
Clyde and Bonnie by Holger Schober (translated by Zoe Svendsen)
Mothers, hide your children! Fathers, hide your savings! Clyde and Bonnie are back in town! A brief synopsis of what happened before: Clyde, whose real name is Werner, and Bonnie, which is her real name – parents can be so cruel – meet each other, fall in love, and start robbing banks. On the occasion of their 10th bank robbery, Bonnie gets shot and killed. Clyde takes refuge in a bar and is actually still sitting there. So much for part one. But what Clyde did not know is that he and Bonnie have a daughter, who is now 16 and somehow feels that she doesn’t fit in with the family she lives with. She doesn’t know that they are her foster family. If the first part of the play was a love story, then the second is the story of a father and a daughter: An evening about responsibility, love and also about how to stay cool when the cops are hot on your heels. The play won the Austrian Theatre for Young People award ‘Stella’ in two categories (incl best production in Theatre for Young People), 2009.
Helver’s Night (Polish) by Ingmar Villqist (Translated by Jacek Laskowski)
Helver’s Night is an expressionist drama about the relationship between Carla and her young charge, Helver. Helver is fascinated by fascism – not by the ideology, which he is unable to grasp, but by the show-off aspects of the movement. In the end he becomes a victim of this fascination.
Busstopkisser (German) by Ralf N.Höhfeld (Translated by Vanessa Fagan)
A boy. A girl. A bus stop. 18 Kisses over 18 months. Coffee and conversation by candlelight, a picnic under the Eiffel Tower. Then the girl vanishes. But was she ever really there? Can anyone without an email address or mobile phone actually be real? A funny, unusual take on the classic boy-meets-girl scenario, Busstopkisser takes the audience on a mind-bending tweet-sized journey through adolescent romance.
