David Warren

Who’s for the Red Room? In all probability, if you’re a well-heeled expat with a cushy number at the UN and a penchant for skinny ladies wrapped in tight denim, you most certainly are.

would have prevented his plays being performed in the country after his death. 

Yet, even within Austria, the land that he so roundly condemned, he is considered to be one of the mightiest giants of 20th-century German-language literature. Nowhere do his dazzling attributes shine brighter than in Extinction, his last, and perhaps darkest novel.

At last they can relax. After a strenuous first season running a dilapidated hotel in the British Lake District, finally the summer is over and Robert and Olivia Chappell can enjoy an evening with their feet up in front of the stove, stiff drink in hand.

An interesting study was once carried out in New York regarding the effects a person’s environment has on their behaviour. A rough district, stuffed with loitering hoodies, run down tenement blocks, wrecked cars and graffiti was cleaned up: The graffiti was wiped from the walls, the council towed the burnt automobiles away, buildings were spruced up and the police stamped down on public associations of menacing looking youths. Suddenly the area was a nice place to live, and what did the watching sociologists observe?

Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat is essentially a collection of amusing anecdotes told by three friends as they make their way up the Thames from London. Whether the novel makes a suitable subject for drama, however, is highly debatable.

On stage at Vienna’s International Theatre, the play follows Harris (Brian Hatfield), his dog Montmorency, George (Jack Babb), and J (Eric Lomas) from the latter’s room, where the three decide that they are suffering from ‘overwork’, through their river trip, beset by a series of disasters, to its premature end at Oxford. As Harris says of one disaster involving an Irish stew: