About the show
This is a riotously funny, salt-splashed seaside farce – where there’s simply not enough room in the coffin!”
On the Halland coast lies the grand and beautiful “Klitterviken Seaside Hotel.” Or rather… it was grand when it was first built. Now, in the late 1920s, after years of declining guest numbers, the hotel has most definitely seen better days.
This, however, is a fact the pompous owner Estrid stubbornly refuses to acknowledge. In her world, Klitterviken still sparkles, and she will do anything to keep the illusion alive. She constantly badgers her henpecked husband Hubert to do whatever it takes to survive – and above all to maintain the façade of an exclusive seaside hotel, despite what the crumbling walls clearly suggest.
These are the years of Prohibition and counterfeiting, and a fair amount of German moonshine is being smuggled across the Kattegat. Behind his wife’s back, hotel owner Hubert has therefore struck a deal with one of the West Coast’s most notorious smuggling kingpins, Konrad Stålberg, to earn some extra money. A large shipment of illicit liquor has been delivered to the hotel during the night and is now ready to be moved on.
The whole operation might have gone fairly smoothly – if only Estrid hadn’t, on the very same day, booked a memorial service at the hotel for the wealthy widow Stråhle, whose late husband happened to be chairman of Halland’s Temperance Board. The widow has also promised to donate a substantial sum of money to the hotel, provided the service proceeds in a calm and dignified manner.
The owners’ daughter Alfrida also suddenly turns up at the hotel. Normally based in Gothenburg, she is now on a highly personal mission – to expose her suspected unfaithful lover. That she has also recently lost her job and spent most of her parents’ money on the city’s jazz clubs and dance halls… well, those are details she has very carefully chosen not to share with her mother and father.
Naturally, trouble is not long in coming. Pastor Livhed, who is meant to conduct the memorial service, turns out to suffer from narcolepsy and keeps falling asleep at the most unfortunate moments. The local postman Dag-Otto Flink shows up to “help out” but soon can’t remember whether he’s a postman, a smuggler, a waiter, or a priest. The chatty and utterly unfiltered Rut and her mumbling, stumbling, bath-loving husband Ragnar check into the hotel and are, of course, unwillingly dragged into the chaos.
With a crumbling seaside hotel full of smuggled liquor, a corpse gone astray, looming liquor police, far too many priests, and a coffin that never seems to contain what it’s supposed to – the circus quickly reaches total madness!
This is a riotously funny, salt-splashed seaside farce – where there’s simply not enough room in the coffin!
Cast:
Annika Andersson, Micke Riesebeck, Ewa Roos, Jojje Jönsson, Jeanette Capocci, Håkan Klamas, Daniel Träff and Helena Aspeflo