Dea Loher is one of the most powerful and individual voices in German theatre today.

This volume brings together three of her plays to be performed in English.

Olga's Room

Communist. Jew. Revolutionary. Lover. Mother. Olga Benario's story is a searing tale of survival as alongside her fellow prisoners she struggles to hold onto her disintegrating sense of self. Based on real events of the 1930s-40s, Dea Loher's gripping first play spans Brazilian revolution and Nazi dictatorship.

Innocence

A city by the sea. 14 people on the edge. Illegal immigrants afraid of being arrested for a good deed. A philosopher who burns her own books. A woman seeking forgiveness for crimes she didn't commit. A young married man who finds fulfilment laying out corpses. A blind stripper who spends her life being watched by men she cannot see. Innocence is a darkly comic panorama of urban restlessness.

Land Without Words

War meets art in this intimate parable. A painter seeks the perfect image, but in K., a Middle Eastern city, she experiences the effects of war, violence and poverty, impossible to depict. Now she is forced to confront her lifelong beliefs in the value of art, and how to deal with her position in the world today.

Dea Loher's plays have been translated into many languages and staged all over the world, including Australia, Switzerland, France, Great Britain, Greece, Finland, Denmark, Poland, Czechia, Japan and Latin America. Dea Loher received such highly regarded German drama awards as the Else-Lasker-Sch�ler-Dramatikerpreis (2005), the Bertolt-Brecht-Preis der Stadt Augsburg (2006), the M�lheimer Dramatikerpreis (1998 and 2008), the Marieluise-Flei�er- Preis (2009) and the Berliner Literaturpreis (2009).

David Tushingham works as a dramaturg and curator for the Salzburg Festival and the Duesseldorfer Schauspielhaus. He has adapted Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories for The National Theatre, London and translated plays by Roland Schimmelpfennig, Dea Loher, Falk Richter and numerous other contemporary German playwrights. His recent translation of Roland Schimmelpfennig's The Golden Dragon has been performed in London, Edinburgh, Washington D.C., Toronto, Pittsburgh, Melbourne and on tour in India, Kurdistan and Ireland.