Once upon a time, in a world so distant that even the maps are figments of make-believe, there lived the hero of this tale or, some would say, Mr Trouble. Lasso – for that was the name of the sloppily turned-out youngster – was a ne’er-do-well given to frittering away his time in the cellar of Popa, his mother, which smelt of ageing cheese and young wine. Lasso spent his days smoking, drinking, cursing, cheating at cards, urinating against the wall of the town hall and announcing to the world how he wanted only three things from life: skirt, drugs and lazy days - his ‘trinity of principles’, as he was wont to call them, before tripping for the umpteenth time over his equally unruly shoelaces.

One day, Popa, a burly vintner with a heart of tin, calls a halt to his jinks. As Lasso lurches around among the wine barrels, a braggart devoid of talent, hatching grand schemes to marry Scharada, Princess of Busillis, and live a life of leisure, his mother shoves a cake containing arsenic, strychnine and vanilla in front of him, thinking to herself: »Better for me to kill you than for you to die of stupidity!« What she actually says, though, is: »Go on then, but watch out for thieves… and take this cake I’ve baked!« Construing any warning to be a crypto-compliment, Lasso packs up the lethal food and sets off, buzzing with visions of glory...

 

… In the depths of the forest, a place of strange noises and haunt of surly characters of loathsome category, he sits down to eat his picnic. Out of the undergrowth trots a wild boar, weak from hunger. On devouring the cake, the pig wiggles its ears and keels over like a felled tree. Watching as the animal’s bristles stand on end, Lasso sniffs the paper the cake had been wrapped in, taking in the sweetish whiff of maternal betrayal. »Ah-ha,« he goes, for want of anything better to say. As the pig breathes his last, twelve of the very robbers Popa warned Lasso about fall upon him, sporting beards and floppy hats and brandishing knives and flintlocks. After tying Lasso to a tree, they roast the dead boar, gulp the meat down and collapse one after the other, dead as doornails.

Although still bound to the tree, Lasso can’t believe his luck – but then time passes and evening draws in and it gradually dawns on him that an even more miserable death awaits him than the one the robbers had in store for him. Just as he’s about to groan »Silver linings often come with dark clouds« he’s nearly bludgeoned to death by something falling on him from the branch above – a depressive man with a noose around his neck. »Oh, the darkness, the horror,« goes the would-be suicide. »Not properly dead, not properly alive.« »That’ll be down to the rotten rope there,« says Lasso. »Can’t even do that right,« moans the man, whose name is Gallows Bird. His girlfriend, Apricot, has recently dumped him and, for good measure, he’s hidden a freshly carpentered pine coffin at the foot of the tree that he’s just failed to hang himself from. Lasso and Gallows Bird buddy up, crossing a nearby river in the re-purposed coffin, which is kind of like a boat with a lid.

… Eventually they arrive in Busillis, the most puzzling of kingdoms and the realm of good-for-nothing King Zephalus, who dines from silver and savours his ignorance in all matters, a bloated majesty but blessed with a beautiful daughter, named Scharada. The Princess is smart but bored – a dangerous combination: to spare her the ghastliness of a marriage, she has imposed a rule: she will have any suitor whose three riddles she can answer correctly beheaded. However, the first suitor to flummox her three times will receive her hand in marriage – and the entire realm and court along with it. Never having shown himself to be an intellectual giant, Lasso clambers up a ladder onto an oversized chair at the centre of the hall and surprises himself by setting three riddles. [What these riddles are that occur to him spontaneously we won’t reveal here. Some things are reserved for the opera.]

 

The Princess can’t answer his riddles. At a flick of her fingers scholars and academics surge into the hall: bug-eyed astrologers, greasy haired alchemists, paper-capped semioticians, all of them puzzling and frowning, poking at mice skeletons and leafing through tomes, quoting from dreams and mumbling in Latin. None of them can solve the riddles. Lasso, who’s pulled something off for once in his life, is magnanimous, or soft – or both. »I’ll give you another chance,« he says, »but only if we can spend a night in bed together.« The courtiers are scandalised. »What if I laugh?« asks Scharada. »Then you are mine,« goes Lasso. The Princess nods her agreement.

And that night something unexpected happens: Lasso tells stories. And Scharada listens, first with a deadpan expression, then with a twitch of the lips, then spluttering uncontrollably. She laughs and laughs with abandon. And Lasso realises he has won.

Next morning, however, everything is in disarray. The king has vanished (rumour has it: into his own larder), the court flunkeys are whispering, a minister is hiding in a cupboard and there’s been an incident with a high-level conspirator pulling a dagger. »I want what’s rightfully mine!« wails Lasso. »I want my realm!« shouts Scharada. »More than anything else he wants the throne!« yell the others. Suddenly an earthquake hits, first as a tremor, then with the ground shaking and rumbling. Walls wobble, the throne room tilts, and with a roar and a screech Busillis collapses in a cloud of dust.

 

… When the dust has settled, Lasso, Gallows Bird and Scharada are sitting on a hill where the palace used to stand. The kingdom is no more, the scheming and plotting is over and everything else is done with too. Silence, but for the sound of waves on the beach. In a nearby bay a pink clam with golden tassels is singing a heartfelt love song. Gallows Bird stands up and goes wordlessly up to her. With an uncharacteristic gentleness, he climbs inside, envelops himself in her soft folds, sighs deeply – and smiles for the first time in his life.

Lasso looks at Scharada and she at him. Then they gaze upon a world that is larger than any kingdom and sally forth – without luggage, without a plan – and maybe (we can’t be sure) without ever looking back.

Narrated by Tilman Mühlenberg