WAITING FOR A BUS

About the show

Two men sitting at a bus stop waiting for the bus. What sounds like the start of a joke is in fact the setting of Oliver Bukowski's successful TV series, "Warten auf’n Bus" (Waiting for a Bus). A bus stop, somewhere in East Germany, in Brandenburg, the "flyover state", a bus named desire with a view of withered landscapes. Ralf "Ralle" Paschke and Johannes "Hannes" Ackermann have been friends since childhood. Ralle, former engineer in the regional mining sector, and Hannes, a disabled landscape architect, both long-term unemployed, two unmarried East German men, waiting for the bus. And as they wait, there's time for a little chat. And so this countryside bus stop turns out to be the unlikely place that enables an open conversation about the big issues that concern our society right now. Tough but warm-hearted, expressing their opinions freely in the loveliest Brandenburg-Berlin dialect – and guaranteed free of Berlin-Mitte conventions of taste. Series creator Oliver Bukowski and Hannah Zufall have written brand new episodes of "Warten auf’n Bus" for the theatre. East Berlin actor Max Hopp, who recently made his mark at the BE as the Captain of Köpenick, now takes the bus straight from rural East Germany to the Berliner Ensemble as director.