A play about Charles Darwin and his journey with the ship the Beagle. Many years after the five-year long journey, Darwin receives a message that his captain on the ship, FitzRoy, has committed suicide. The play portrays the reception of Darwin’s discoveries, as well as the consequences of taking a stand against existing ideas in a world that is built on the belief in God as the only creator of life.

In a famous photgraphy by the war phographer Robert Capa a woman is forced to run a gauntlet, carrying a small baby and with her hair shaved off. Her name is Simone and the event takes place in the French town of Chartres after the liberation of France in WWII. Simone has had a baby with a German soldier and is now to be brought to prison to start serving her sentence for treason. The only person in the phography who does not look at Simone, is her father, who, in a resolute way, carries a small bag with his daugther’s belongings while his eyes are fixed to the ground.

Through the events the play exposes some bitter truths about human nature as well as deep compassion in a way which has become a trademark for Henning Mankell.

A group of people are gathered on a barren island far out in the archipelago. They are there to look at a house which has been been put to sale. The owner is a young woman who wants to run away from all the in-fighting with her siblings, which she fears a shared ownership of the house will render. But also, she wants to escape all the bad memories she associates with the place.

All those interested in the house form a very disparate group. However, they seem to share the interest to use the house as some sort of recluse rather than a place to long for. Among the interested we find a night club owner suffering from insomnia, a middle aged CEO and his submissive wife who try to find a place where they can reconnect with their teenage daughter and an ex-model who has passed her prime and now takes a rather bitter outlook on life.

Since the bad weather has made it impossible to leave the island. this ill-assorted group is forced to spend an entire evening in each other’s company,

With great warmth and compassion Henning Mankell presents three very different life stories that in their everyday dreadfulness are difficult to remain untouched by.

Three homeless people, Anna, Harry and Luke, are spending their desolate days on a bench. Seemingly completely dejected, they have stopped managing their health, squabble over change, and fight about whose turn it is to go shopping at the liqueur store. In retrospect scenes and episodes, we follow them, individually, towards their fall. Anna has managed to get out of her broken marriage, full of lies and abuse, only to lose her only child. Harry is forced out of the family business, since the mother and brother have gone tired of his wrong doings and homosexual dissipation. Lukas is the talented poet who refuses to adapt and eventually consumes his publisher's confidence. Each one of them is drawn on a string of the most violent and destructive forces of love. Despite its tragic act, this is a play to be strangely lifted and inspired by. 

"Leaves no one untouched. A play about aid workers in Africa that unites the precipices with the crazy black humor" (SvD). "An eye-opener that the white man's exploitation and etnoscentricism is not a thing of the past, but something that very much still exists." (Sundsvall’s Newspaper) 

Mankell is in a charming, snappy and entertaining mood in this witty and skillful depiction of Strindberg as a young and precocious genius. We get to meet three women in his life; the young dresser with theatrical aspirations, his future wife, Siri von Essen, and the proposed landlord. 

"Is there anything more vulnerable than a child who no one loves." This is the tender and violent story of an abandoned child’s journey with a shattered soul and a weak mind. With strong poetic images, and with the deep colors pain, this child is followed from the inferno of psychosis to a slow awakening in a brighter existence. 

A play about hostility towards foreingers and about the search for a homeland.

A number of suggestive and poetic short pieces, with few roles. About the foreign man who came to the small village in Norrland and wanted to ignite a fire on the bog for everyone who was freezing. About the fantastic Klara who went out into the world to see if the earth was round, but could just walk straight ahead. About the man who mixed up his wife's head with a hat. And about the man who loved his memory. And the dying girl, Bhagawanda’s trip to India, who knew that death was a piece of rice in a blue bowl. 

The play takes place in 1942, around Tynnesholm castle somewhere in Skåne. It is rumored that a wounded, English aviator is kept hidden somewhere in the neighborhood. Stettner, a manager with strong Nazi sympathies, does not intend to give up until every corner has been searched in the hunt for the hidden "enemy".

An elderly man goes to Africa and in the middle of the savannah he encounters the village idiot. A Massai that every year on the  19th of May, is waiting for the white woman, she who once left a red bag in order to have a reason to come back. He has waited for 33 years.

Have we received a certain, limited number of steps to walk here on earth? And can we cheat death by dancing, floating forward instead? A strange, warm and poetic monologue about time, love and aging.

From Henning Mankell’s preface: This is a play about some people who called themselves "normal". It means that some of them asked what the meaning of life is, while others never even validated the question. But all are tangent to our lives. This is a story about some Swedish people, from a Saturday afternoon in August 1936, to a day in October in the 1980s. You can say that this is a story between two rains, two cloudbanks on a 40-year distance.

A dream-play about Elise Ottesen-Jensen, Swedish agitator and woman.

Very few are able to portray other cultures and give us the opportunity to take a look at ourselves, our ignorance and our prejudices about the world, as good as Henning Mankell.  Here he allows a female host on Swedish television to be confronted with a young Muslim woman who gradually reveals her ethnic as well as erotic secrets and brings matters to a head.

A tale about life and death.

One evening in a suburb, author Jesper Humlin meets three immigrant girls at a boxing club. They are there to learn how to write. The girls tell Jesper about their lives, and a planned detective novel becomes something entirely different than an ordinary mystery. Jesper and the girls are living in the same country, but in two different worlds. Tea-Bag is a tale of myth and reality. It is about Sweden in 2003, seen through a middle-aged man's eyes.

Time of Darkness is about a father and his daughter, on the run from their homeland. They are now hiding in an apartment somewhere in Sweden.

Hasse Karlsson is on the way to his mother's deathbed. At a temporary interruption on the journey, the story is revealed as to why their lengthy conflict first occurred. The story is told through a childhood winter landscape where two boys, Hasse and Svalan, meet on the threshold of another world as well as in the process of becoming adults. Being an adult according to Svalan includes exposing those who deserve it, to fear and revenge. Hasse becomes reluctantly involved in Svalan’s thoughts and lets himself be guided towards an outrageous action he does not want to perform.

Take a trip into the bright heart of Africa’s darkness, among dead spirits and living souls. Follow the Swedish aid worker, Hans Olov Viktor Andersson, in a shattering and dramatic meeting with the warm, dreamy, and frightening Africa. His meeting with a people who tell about other experiences, have other ways of thinking, live other lives, and who despite colonialization, sing.

"A bar or a pub. With that non-Swedish appearance that bars have today. A Bartender is serving, but does not utter a single word during the show. Late evening. The only guest is Rune F. Lindgren. "He is about 45 years old, almost bald, owns 49% of an excavator, is divorced, has two children, and has played 46 seconds of professional football without touching the ball. He is awaiting Kristina, artist and former model. And he does not want to die in the bathroom like his father, but still he scrawls down, "God is a lottery."

Old Maid is an exciting drama for young people about a family living in poverty. But when Anna, the mother, unexpectedly wins a million Swedish kronor on the lottery, the situation is drastically reversed, but her family’s reaction is somewhat astounding.

“And the Sand Calls Out is about the feeling of belonging, about what happens to a person who may not be what one is supposed to be... But it is also about the question of existence, and about the specific story that all cultures have and who Swedes really are, as seen by a dark-skinned, animistic child who is used to live close to the ground. Mankell has written a very lyrical, almost pantheistic text about nature and proximity as spiritual qualities we have forgotten all about... But it is also an existential piece, narrated in a devout mythic way..." (SvD) "Touching poetry through great distances..." (DN)

"Henning Mankell shows us that theater about politics does not have to be boring. Although the play begins with a disillusioned social democratic politician’s suicide, there lies an entertaining performance ahead. The motive is serious and relevant in a country where politicians’ contempt have become equal to regular milk." (GP)

The story revolves around the imaginative boy, Liman, and his poor upbringing with many siblings at a rail switch in the inland of Västerbotten, Sweden. Liman uses his imagination to get through life, but by doing that, he also gets into a lot of trouble.

In a disused factory where submarines formerly where built, a conference will be held dicussing, "The new wisdom" or "About the meaning of life". Hasse, robot-engineer, Stina, computer nerd with a manager on Bali, and Herbert, philosopher with fear of germs and churches, will attend this conference. It has been announced that an American professor will speak on the theme of "Perception and knowledge in an era of emptiness." He does not show up, and neither do the rest of the designated conference participants. But a woman, who built torpedo ramps until four years ago, comes to retrieve her old uniform.