About the performance

A fine mess Fedora and her magpies are in! First Fedora’s big clock breaks down and then the magpies are up to their tricks again: the sparkling number eight has vanished and now Time has gone haywire. The sunbearer is waiting in vain for the moon to come up so he can get off work – and settle down in front of the telly! And who’s ‘left with the washing up’ as it were? Fedora as always. And as if that weren’t enough, now she’s got to find the eight! Time to do the washing up… Maybe Mrs Soup Tureen’s got it in New York. So Fedora sets off across the Atlantic with her magpies and a pair of rather strange twins, Maurice and Maurice. But the brothers are constantly nodding off and they almost end up capsizing the boat. They arrive to find that Mrs Soup Tureen has finished preparing her Krakra broth, a rather foul concoction, so Fedora decides to pursue her quest elsewhere. But how on earth is she going to get back to Berlin? The barrel-organ taxi is too expensive. And to cap it all, Don Quixote appears and the pillow police search them all for pillows. And as the eight is still missing, Time looks set to stand still. Will Fedora think of something before it’s too late?

NACHT BIS ACHT is François Sarhan’s first excursion into musical theatre for children. Elements of childlike playfulness, dreams and subconscious imagination – surrealist themes – crop up again and again in the works of the French artist. In a work commissioned by the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Sarhan has come up with a surreal and absurd piece of musical theatre that offers no answers to questions regarding time and its dimensions in reality and dreams but does present a plethora of unusual musical images.