Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe

• Stage Art & Theatre

by Robert Lepage and Ensemble / directed by Robert Lepage / translated by Uli Menke / Guest Performance Schaubühne Berlin

A new play by Robert Lepage, devised in collaboration with actors from the Schaubühne ensemble. When rehearsals began, there was no text, no story, no characters, and just one object: a deck of cards. Lepage assigned the themes of love, faith, war and money to the four suits of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds. Improvisations based on the cards, their suits, figures and numbers, have created whole worlds, hugely diverse characters, and four intertwined narratives that stretch across eight decades of German history. 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. And 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.

Duration 4:45h, with intermission

18. and 19. April 2025, Thalia Theater 

With English Surtitles

with the kind support of the Quebec Government Office and the Embassy of Canada