Zurich - Theaterspektakel

Theaterspektakel - Taking Cover at the Back!

As I was scratching my head, wondering what to write about next, I realised that I hadn’t yet said anything about Theaterspektakel. This is a theatre festival of sorts – it’s located by the lake and a stage is set up for paid performances. In addition to this, the area is laid out with various stalls selling food and drink.

You can wander round and watch various performances for free – usually magicians or other types of street performers.

I’ve been there many times with Lena but we have a bit of a history of managing to wait for each other at different entrances and thus spending quite a lot of time hanging about beforehand. It’s not helped by the fact that I’m not a mobile phone type of person and often forget to bring it with me / charge it in advance / have it switched on / bring a note of my SIM password. There’s such a lot to remember, I really don’t know how people cope.

Anyway, this time we settled for an unambiguous meeting point at Buerkliplatz, so that we could arrive in style by the boat that’s laid on by the event (you have to pay a nominal fee unless you are Lena and have a special card).

It’s one of the many summer events in Zurich that rely on good weather. I envied the swimmers a bit as we arrived, but the evening was a good temperature and we strolled about looking at the various acts and deciding where to eat. I usually have a Mistkraetzeli (a small chicken described in wonderful Swiss terminology as “shit scratcher” as Lena likes to point out), but this time I was in the mood for a lamb curry. It’s the usual process of paying a deposit on your glass which you get back when you return your drinking vessel.

It seemed to me that there were slightly more acts than usual this year – one guy doing balloon animals, another performer slicing a sheet of newspaper with a whip into ever tinier sections while a petrified volunteer held it steady, another magician cutting a girl into two.

We sat down for a drink, but the only place was beside two smokers. It’s so ironic that the Swiss, who are such keen skiers, swimmers, cyclists, and mountaineers, are also avid smokers. I guess they have to have at least one vice to show that they are, after all, human.

The wind started to pick up out of nowhere. People started to move themselves to places where there was cover. Lena and I sat there, believing it would just blow over. A few big drops splatted onto our table, but we clung to our belief that it would be only a shower. Eventually, as we got wetter and wetter, it became clear that it wasn’t going to be just a short flurry and so we, too, took cover, only there wasn’t much space left at this point.

We ended up in the actors’ entrance just behind one of the free acts on the main stage. The act was a slapstick acrobatic magic show type thing and really it was as interesting to see the childrens’ faces as anything else (I’m not entirely sure the performers realised that so many children were going to be present as some of the humour was a little adult). I don’t think I’d seen so many children in previous years, but Lena said it was earlier this year and so the children were still on holiday. We were probably a bit of a nuisance to the actors who kept on pushing past us to get to their lockers, but they were very polite all the same.

By the time we went home, though, the rain had stopped, so it wasn’t such a big deal!