Sergi Belbel creates »a big city polonaise about ›love and other cruelties‹ and then links and confronts in it single people, lovers and families who form a contact circle of lonely individuals: a younger man hits a younger woman because they do not have to say anything to each other any more, she hits back and then sends him, he who is now dumbfounded in pain, to her neighbour to pick up oil for their common meal.

The same younger woman forces her mother into an old age home, ›the cruellest war is between mother and daughter‹. In the home the mother meets an old woman who loves tango and women but had to live with a man whom she searched for out on the streets during the night and found as a tramp. The tramp is joined by a youth who mugs to get money so that he can live in a steady, drunken stupor, who then fully aroused lies in the parental bathtub with his father, who bids at the train station farewell to his, him nauseating, mistress, who was invited to visit her father and to whom she says: ›You are lonely but that is not my fault.‹

Her father gives a young man a mirror, so that they mutually can enjoy in it their reflected bodies. The young man stuffs his mother in a low-cut dress to kill her pain about his homosexuality. Now all alone, the woman sorts her money as the bell rings at her door – the slightly injured younger man from the beginning of the polonaise now asks her; the neighbour, for oil, so that ›two odd people meet‹ and ›the air gets hot, sensual … ‹

The in 1963 in Tarassa/Barcelona born Sergi Belbel is an author, translator and director. Amongst others, he translated Racine, Beckett and Koltès into the Catalan and Castilian languages and produced for television and the theatre. Since 1986, Belbel wrote numerous plays that were shown in Spain, France and Portugal. ›Streicheleinheiten‹ (›Caresses‹) had its first showing in 1992 under his direction in Barcelona.« (Schauspiel Leipzig, programme season 1994/95)

A new era of the Schauspiel Leipzig starts with the 1995/96 season under the directorship of Wolfgang Engel, who himself is an extremely succesful producer. Armin Petras, the producer of the Leipzig production »Streicheleinheiten (»Caresses«, first showing in october) was born in 1964 in Meschede/Ruhr. After completing his studies at the Berlin’s University of Performing Arts »Ernst Busch«, since 1990 he was director at the Münchner Kammerspiele, at the Kleisttheater in Frankfurt/Oder, at the Schauspielhaus Chemnitz and he produced numerous works of classic and modern authors. Since 1985 he also works with the independent theatre group »Medea« in Berlin.