Wir sind noch einmal davongekommen
('The Skin of Our Teeth')
by Thornton Wilder
'That's all we do – always beginning again! Over and over again. Why do we go on pretending? Someday the whole earth's going to have to turn cold anyway, and until then it will be more wars and more walls of ice and floods and earthquakes.'
Thornton Wilder's The Skin of Our Teeth premiered in the USA in 1942, in the middle of the Second World War, and is one of the great dramatic works of the 20th century. The drama successfully manages to simultaneously be set in the present, in Biblical times and during the Ice Age.
The protagonist Mr Antrobus lives with his family in an age now declared to be the Anthropocene, amidst war and crisis. With a sleight of hand, Wilder lets the family experience and survive apocalyptic scenarios from various eras, the Ice Age, the Deluge and the Second World War. The apocalypse is seen as a basic element of the human species, which has evolved only to bring disaster to the entire Earth. However, unlike the dinosaurs or mammoths, humans have survived all disasters, so far. The question remains whether humankind, in view of the climate crisis caused by itself, and constantly new wars, can also survive in future 'by the skin of its teeth'.
Imogen Kogge was a member of the Berliner Schaubühne ensemble for over ten years, where she primarily starred in productions by Peter Stein, Andrea Breth, Klaus Michael Grüber and Luc Bondy. Her recent theatre work includes performances at the Salzburg Festival, at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and at the Schauspielhaus Zurich. She also regularly features in cinema and TV productions such as Christian Schmidt's Requiem, or Alone in Berlin or The Universal Theory, and is one of the stalwart detectives in the long-running TV crime series Polizeiruf 110.
Caroline Peters performs at the Burgtheater in Vienna and at the Berliner Schaubühne, and is also at home on the other great stages of the German-speaking countries. She played the Paramour in Jedermann at the Salzburg Festival. Her role as the inspector in the TV crime series Homicide Hills has made her a star; at the cinema, she starred in the successful comedies How About Adolf?, Family Affairs and, most recently, Die Unschärferelation der Liebe. She has won the Adolf-Grimme-Preis television award and Austria's Nestroy theatre prize, and has twice been voted Actress of the Year.
Following many long runs at the Burgtheater and other important theatres, Martin Brambach is famous as one of the most versatile German film actors, thanks to over 150 roles. On TV, he plays Inspector Schnabel in the Dresden-based episodes of the long-running TV crime series Tatort, for example, a portrayal that has earned him an Adolf-Grimme-Preis television award, and he has also appeared in such successful productions as the adaptations of Schirach's Shades of Guilt and Thomas Vinterberg's The Command. Most recently, he played Helmut Schön in the miniseries Gute Freunde – Der Aufstieg des FC Bayern.
© Reading rights: S. Fischer Verlag GmbH, Frankfurt am Main
