a german play in Oxford, The Woman from before

It seems that Roland Schimmelpfennig is the most popular comtemporary German playwright. While this play opened in Vienna in 2004, this year it was oxford students who shared it in the very intimate Burton Taylor studio. There were only 5 rows of us, as the audience, in front of the almost packed up house of Frank and Claudia. After 19 years of marriage they were moving somewhere with their son Andi, who was rather ambivalent about leaving his girlfriend Tina. So it was inevitable that something big was going to happen. This was physically and psychologically embodied in Romy, Frank's first love. She claimed that he "swore to me that you'll always love me" and she was back to extract his promise. This play was sombre and seemed to take us to the worst possible scenario, becoming darker and more complicated with each scene. It really does not pay to dream of a way out of tedious everyday relationships...