Since the opening performance at our Comedy Festival in 2004, Tristero has presented no less than five sold-out series of Abigail’s Party, a bittersweet comedy by the filmmaker and playwright Mike Leigh. This set – which is more like an installation in the style of Guillaume Bijl – is the starting point for Living. The characters in Abigail’s Party evolve in this very same space.

Apart from ‘regular’ performances, over the past years Needcompany has also developed a theatrical laboratory setting that is open to the public: Needlapb. Lap refers to laptop and lab to laboratory: two experimental spaces.

The Nature Theater of Oklahoma – the name comes from the last chapter of Kafka’s novel America – is one of New York’s most talented theatre companies of the last few years. The directors Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper create clever, funny, very physical and unconventional productions. No Dice is an ‘epic of everyday life’. An epic in which there is room for false moustaches and pirate hats.

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Tony Kushner’s diptych Angels in America is a modern classic. America in the eighties. The politics are hard and cold. Aids is the new disease. A group of New Yorkers unintentionally appear in one another’s lives. The spectacle of world politics unfolds in the intimacy of a domestic drama.

Back in the USSR tells the story of three Soviet girls as seen through the eyes of a German journalist looking for archive pictures in the former Soviet block. What has happened to the young pioneers of that period, the members of the Komsomol youth organisation, of which an estimated two thirds of today’s adults were a member. Back in the USSR switches between past and present in an idiom that is highly expressive, musical and physical.

At the conference in Yalta (February 1945) the border between Germany and Poland was redrawn. As a result, millions of people were driven from their homes. This is what Transfer! is all about, a production by the Polish ‘angry young director’ Jan Klata, told and performed by people who experienced the drama at that time.

In 2006 Jan Decorte staged his first opera, Dido and Aeneas by the English baroque composer Henry Purcell. Together with the English conductor Richard Egarr and a select cast, Decorte made it an unforgettable event. De Morgen: ‘A gem of simplicity, rightness and emotion.’

After Mefisto for ever, Guy Cassiers is working on Wolfskers, the second part of a trilogy devoted to the discordant relationship between art, politics and power. Whereas Mefisto for ever showed an artist who allows himself to be seduced and corrupted by power, Wolfskers focuses on those in power themselves, with Hitler, Lenin and Hirohito as main figures.

Jan Decorte was one of the first theatre-makers in Flanders to work with the whimsical, poetical, seemingly untheatrical plays of Heiner Müller. Now, he would again like to confront the wildness and radicality of Müller’s work.

Beverly and Laurent, a respectable couple, give a cocktail party in honour of the new neighbours. After several rounds it becomes difficult to keep things agreeable.  Abigail’s Party is a biting comedy written in the style of a soap by Mike Leigh. Tristero has made a wonderfully kitsch version of it in a pure seventies style. This season we will be presenting the play for the fifth time. A classic!