In order to escape their wives' frenzied and ruinously expensive Saturday shopping trips, Helmut, Luc and Eroll regularly take shelter in the boiler room under the shopping centre. They spend their time trying to make the television work, plugging and unplugging useless objects, and discussing their partners' most recent extravagances. Mario, a fireman in civilian clothes, turns up to turf them out, but he quickly ends up becoming a companion in misfortune. Now there are four of them, and the men all agree on one point: they have to stop their wives from making them waste their entire weekend. Their personalities gradually become clearer: Helmut is a cowardly hypocrite, Luc a cynical erotomaniac who never stops flirting on his mobile phone, Eroll is an uncomplicated chap, Mario a fake tough guy. The plan they make to reassert themselves seems to be flawless but fails to take into account the impossibility of reasoning with a woman addicted to window shopping. Helmut, Luc and Mario end up being thrown out of their homes and go round the bend trying to find the right way to return home with dignity. Only Eroll manages to play his hand well, because he appears to have understood that what a woman wants, is what a woman doesn't want!'.

This play belongs to that seemingly rare breed, the German light comedy, and what's more, it's extremely well-written! It portrays a world where a group of indisputably mediocre men are crushed underfoot by frenzied spendthrift women. They take refuge in a childish, and in the long term, self-destructive form of misogyny. Rather than psychological, the treatment is satirical, caricatural, derisive, and one feature of it is to seek - and find - laughter on every occasion, even when ultimately tragic. Like many light comedies, the play ends with the pathetic defeat of the worthless and ultra-deceived male, that is to say, in total blackness (in the literal sense, as the three losers find themselves locked in without a light), blackness and defeat from which only the (relatively) pure and simple soul of the group is spared. The text's greatest strength, apart from its excellent verbal humour and sparkling style, is structural: Eroll's triumph at the end comes about because he keeps on elaborating (initially in an irrational way) on a piece of advice that Helmut gives him, in scorn, at the beginning (think of Hemingway!'), while Luc's descent into hell is punctuated throughout by his flirtation on his mobile. The running gags about the television which just won't work and the fact that there aren't enough electric plugs for four, recur systematically throughout with psychological, but always playful, presence of mind: the object as a way of letting off steam, compulsive plugging as a substitute for penetration, the combination of object plus plugging as an attempt to establish oneself as the 'dominant male' of the group. The author's anti-commercial message is brought home with exhilarating excess, not heavy-handedly, and the way he shows couples falling apart from the angle of shopping frenzy has nothing demonstrative about it. An extremely funny, occasionally eccentric play, which challenges a number of preconceptions about German drama!