The Story of the Panda Bears Told by a Saxophonist Who Has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt

In a flat, in a bed, we meet two young people. They don’t know each other. He can’t even remember how they ended up in this bed after a bender, let alone remember her name. But she remembers everything: whose flat this is, which party they were at the night before, whether they made love or not, that he recited Baudelaire’s poetry and played the saxophone, which won her over. But what she tells him is not necessarily what happened. Because he wants to know, he insists she should come back to him. She promises she will, for nine nights. He promises to wait.
Nine nights is like a lifetime for these two people. They travel through them like through a dream. In a story that happens on the border between intimacy and loneliness, wakefulness and dreams, between light and darkness, and between life and death, we discover that sometimes we need no more for the road to self and perfection than a bottle of wine, a saxophone, and a broken alarm clock.
An apparent romantic comedy with elements of surrealism and lyricism constantly tests our imagination, shakes our logic and challenges our consciousness. In charming, but non-sugary dialogue Matei Visniec (1956) emphasises a rare element of romantic storytelling: silence. The Romanian author, poet, journalist, philosopher, and dreamer, who emigrated to France because of censorship, has written more than twenty plays, mostly in French; they’ve been translated to eighteen languages. His plays are performed all over the world, he’s the most widely performed Romanian author, and in recent years the most performed European author. The play The Story of the Panda Bears Told by a Saxophonist Who Has a Girlfriend in Frankfurt was first performed at the Avignon Festival and then more than ten times around the world.