Ralf

A spaceship crashes and an alien emerges from the wreckage. He finds refuge from prying eyes with a family who take him in. When Alf was broadcast in the late 1980s, the world was still in order, at least on the small screen. The government, of course, isn’t allowed to find out about this extraterrestrial visitor. But an average American family is more than able to accommodate this shaggy-haired, space travelling anarchist.

Germany in the 2010s. The viewers from the 1980s have grown up. There’s not much left of the stability and optimism embodied by this TV series from their childhood. When Ralf crash-lands in the Tanner’s garden, they take him in, albeit hesitantly. The main reason, however, that he’s allowed to stay is that his moonlighting pays the rent that Willie, a failed author, can’t afford. For Willie’s wife, the new arrival is one more piece in the mosaic of her failed life; her two teenage children long since inhabit realms she has no access to. Unlike his “predecessor”, who brought new verve to a boring, respectable life in the suburbs, Ralf has no option but try to find a little certainty in a jungle of uncertain employment and online dating.

Lisa Danulat’s bitter-funny play shows the excessive demands faced by a generation whose situation and prospects are precarious; which is confronted with the unsettling realisation that promises of happiness and security remain unfulfilled and that certainties are, in truth, fragile. These are bad times for an alien that just wants to live his life here.