The Belle Vue

Horváth's setting for this black political farce is a seedy hotel in Central Europe in the 1920s where the only guest is a drunken, ageing nymphomaniac - wealthy and despotic. Under her sole occupancy the hotel is falling apart and sliding even deeper into decadence. There is no future and no hope until a young woman arrives with a fortune to spend. What follows is a riot of confusion and mistaken identities, satirising the despair and futility of a continent poised on the brink of fascism....