About the work
Neil Simon's comedy Last of the Red Hot Lovers was premiered in 1969 at the Eugene O'Neill Theatre on Broadway and is among the most popular comedies of American boulevard theatre. The play was filmed in 1972 with Alan Arkin and Paula Prentiss and, in Germany under the title Der letzte der feurigen Liebhaber, became a staple of comedy and boulevard stages. To this day it is performed regularly at houses such as the Komödie am Kai in Vienna, the Theater Schloss Maßbach and the Kleines Theater Essen.
Plot
Barney Cashman, 47, owner of a New York fish restaurant and faithfully married for 23 years to his high-school sweetheart Helma, is seized by a midlife panic. With middling ambitions and a strong smell of fish, he dreams of the great affair. His mother's apartment is to serve as a discreet love nest — free once a week, as long as Mama does volunteer work at the hospital. Across three acts Barney fails miserably with three women: Elaine Navazio, a brash regular at his restaurant; Bobbi Michele, a deranged actress from California with prescription joints in her bag; and Jeanette Fischer, his wife's melancholy best friend, who tallies up for him how little of life is worth living. Every attempt ends in fiasco.
Cultural significance
Der letzte der feurigen Liebhaber is Neil Simon's masterpiece of the middle-class midlife-crisis comedy and has for decades been a reliable audience favourite on German-language boulevard stages. The three-act structure, each act with a single solo actress's appearance, makes the play a feast for ensemble chemistry and comedic craft. With warmth and sharp observation, Simon shows that the great sexual liberation of the late 1960s also had its tragicomic losers. The German-language productions benefit from its timeless everyday observation: the fear of ageing, the inability to betray, the comedy of one's own incapacity.