Piece by Biljana Srbljanović

»In ›Familiengeschichten. Belgrad‹ (›Family Stories. Belgrade‹) the characters are children playing in a meadow. There they don’t play basketball or table tennis, but the game life is playing with them, a kind of Serbian roulette. But it is no game of chance, the ending is always the same. Deaths strikes the parents who are played by the children, but as ›fighters‹. Every time they look a bit more shaken, but they find their way back into a new everyday situation. But the situation doesn’t change. At the waiting room Belgrade it means to while away the time and to keep oneself busy until something will change maybe one day« (Peter Gorschlüter, Programmheft des Deutschen Schauspielhauses Hamburg, 1998).

»The Piece plays in Belgrade – after the Bosnia conflict and before the NATO bombing… The heroes of this play are … citizen of a ruined country. The play shows realities in families, which also mark the actual state of civilized societies outside Belgrade – a Panorama of omnipresent horrors between kitchen table and nursery« (Schauspiel Leipzig, Jahresheft 1999/2000).

Biljana Srbljanović was born in Belgrade in 1970 and studied dramaturgy and theatre science. In 1994 she wrote the script for »Open Doors«, a 33-part TV comedy series, and in 1996 the »Belgrade Trilogy«, her first theater play, which had its premiere in her native town in 1997 and was shown at the Bienale in Bonn in 1998. »Family Stories. Belgrade«, with its premiere in Belgrade in April 1998, had its German premiere at the Deutsche Schauspielhaus Hamburg in November the same year.

Karsten Schiffler, born in Berlin in 1959, produces – after having worked in Bochum, Freiburg, Bremen and Essen – for the first time at the Schaupiel Leipzig.