Nebenan (Next Door)

It’s summer in a hip neighbourhood and two people take refuge in their local bar: Florian a movie actor leading a charmed life, and the older Bruno, an eternal underdog. They are neighbours living in the same house and yet in different worlds. One of them is a newcomer whose home is a luxurious loft while the other is a local who has been living in his two-room flat for what seems like an eternity. Florian is about to leave for London, where he will go to a casting call for an international movie production. Bruno asks him for an autograph. Beginning as a harmless conversion it turns into a treacherous game of cat and mouse that addresses issues like old East-West conflicts, lifelong delusions, and the sovereignty of shaping one’s own narrative. Bruno has been waiting for this moment for a long time. And Florian soon realises that he is at the receiving end of a reckoning that goes far beyond this encounter. 

Daniel Kehlmann has written a dark yet comedic chamber play that fully engages with the microcosmos that is the bar and with the confrontation between two characters, while tackling a pressing question of our time: who does the city belong to and what happens to people when their homes become a barely affordable item of speculation? Increasing social inequality, unlawful eviction strategies, and sterile, desolate neighbourhoods are the collateral damage of a misguided policy that promoted the privatisation of formerly state-owned housing. Bruno, one of the many residents who have drawn the short straw in the gold-digging game of real estate, feels that his city no longer belongs to him and that the value of his own history has plummeted into the process.