Hotel Savoy

Europe between the World Wars. After three years imprisoned in Russia, Gabriel Dan is released and returns to find, among the suffering and destruction, a relic of the past: the Hotel Savoy. Once inhabited by the wealthy, the lower seven floors seem to preserve the glitz of the pre-war era. But the higher Dan ascends, the cheaper the rooms become and the more diverse and poor their inhabitants. Here, he finds a place to stay. Hopeless variety performers, hustlers and speculators populate these rooms, each on a different trajectory yet damned to remain. Soon, all their hopes are pinned to the arrival of Bloomfeld, an American millionaire. At the same time, discontent is welling in the city; a workers’ revolt is brewing. But the eagerly anticipated changes fail to materialise, as Bloomfeld disappoints all hope...

«In Koen Tachelet’s circumspect adaptation,« the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes, Gabriel Dan’s observations «Are no longer eager notes written by an intellectual but the wondering soliloquies of a lonely, rootless figure traumatised by war. In a way that heightens the play’s charismatic qualities, it becomes unavoidable on stage that the miraculous world of the hotel ... has Gabriel as its axis, rather than Gabriel turning around the world.«It is incredible «How much comedy, playful enjoyment and full-on narrative theatre Simons manages to bring out of Roth’s novel without losing the power of the content ... not least thanks to Koen Tachelet’s epic, tightly focussed stage adaptation that expertly uses the dialogue form.» (Süddeutsche Zeitung)