About the work
Lukas Bärfuss's play was premiered in 2010 at the Schauspielhaus Zürich. The work is a bourgeois tragedy in terse, precise dialogue and negotiates the fragility of the modern middle-class marriage. Bärfuss writes in a reduced, almost minute-taking style that lets the unspoken between the characters work all the more strongly.
Plot
A couple — he a doctor, she in a respectable profession — are on holiday in Spain. Their ten-year-old daughter has stayed behind with the grandmother. At a dinner they meet another couple. Between the four adults a cautious round dance of hints, flirtation, slights and approaches unfolds. When the daughter has an accident at home, the two parents react in different ways: the mother stays in order to sleep with the strange man, the father travels back. At the end stands the suppressed catastrophe — and the silence that turns the marriage into a hollow shell.
Cultural significance
Malaga became one of the most-performed Bärfuss plays and was staged at numerous theatres in the German-speaking world. The work is regarded as a precise study of the late-modern middle class and the emotional speechlessness of present-day couples. Bärfuss combines Strindberg references with a contemporary surface aesthetic and shows how a family breaks apart on its own claim to normality. The play was invited to the 2011 Berlin Theatertreffen.