NEBENAN

A well-known film actor, whose career is unstoppable and who seems to be doing well in his private life, meets a neighbor he doesn't know shortly before an important casting in London, which is supposed to accelerate his international career, downstairs in the corner pub in the house where he has bought a loft. He starts to provoke him with more and more details about his private life. How does he know all this? He can't know all this just because he lives on the other side of the courtyard.

He turns out to be an employee of a credit card company who can get an exact picture of his customers' lives from their account transactions. Every time the actor wants to take a cab, he reveals a new detail: about his wife's infidelity, about very private internet surfing, about new film projects that are threatening to fail. And the neighbor also has a very definite opinion about the actor's film roles.

He suddenly sees his whole life in front of him. And he slowly realizes that this is an elaborate revenge plan by someone who sees himself as a victim of gentrification and a loser of the turnaround. And it seems to work and begins to completely disrupt the life of the supposed winner.

After "Heilig Abend" (premiered at the Theater in der Josefstadt, Vienna), Daniel Kehlmann has once again succeeded in creating a real and, in the clash of these two actually incompatible worlds, also very comic theater thriller with strong dialogues and a surprising plot.