Glücklich die Glücklichen

You know that moment when – at the cheese counter in the supermarket, or when you run into an old school friend on the tram – the thought suddenly occurs to you that you’re in the wrong life? That you took a wrong turn someone? That the man sleeping beside you night after night might not be the right person for you? And: would you admit it? And: do you know that moment when you simply switch off the light on the nightstand and continue on the next morning as if nothing has happened?
Yasmina Reza's novel "Glücklich die Glücklichen" ("Happy Are the Happy") dissects Parisian middle-class relationships along with their everyday irritations and nastiness, and very closely scrutinises the so-called "good life" of the kind of people who find it so difficult to differentiate between expectations and desires, and therefore always choose what is more secure. Because what does it even mean, "to be happy"?    

Yasmina Reza, born in 1959 in Paris, has been examining the dark underbelly of middle-class society in her novels and plays for over thirty years. With "Kunst" ("Art"), she became one the most frequently performed playwrights of her generation. "Der Gott des Gemetzels" ("The God of Carnage") has been published in more than forty languages and was adapted for the screen by Roman Polanski. At the Berliner Ensemble, director and artistic director Oliver Reese will now direct the first German-language adaptation of her novel "Glücklich die Glücklichen".