The DEAD LADIES SHOW is a series of entertaining and inspiring presentations on women who achieved amazing things against all odds. Each show hosts passionate cheerleaders of too-oft forgotten women, inviting its loyal audience into a sexy séance (of sorts) celebrating these impressive icons, turbulent lives, and deathless legacies.

This June, we bring you our popular bilingual format, once again featuring fascinating talks in either English or German. Meet the ghosts of a groundbreaking designer, a much-lauded exiled writer and a proud domestic servant in a show that promises yet more fascinating facts and historical insights. Our passionate presenters this time are your beloved co-host KATY DERBYSHIRE, the amazing German literary artist LEA KUBENECK and our podtastic producer SUSAN STONE. All held together, of course, by your other beloved co-host FLORIAN DUIJSENS.

As ever, you can expect a charming audience and a warm and entertaining atmosphere.

Standard tickets cost €10 and the reduced price is €4. Seeing it’s a Sunday, we’re starting earlier. Doors open 6:30 pm – come on time to get a good seat!

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MARGARETE SCHÜTTE-LIHOTZKY (1897–2000) is famous for inventing the Frankfurt Kitchen in 1926, the first fitted kitchen designed to enable clean, comfortable cooking in working-class homes. Born in Vienna, she was the first woman allowed to study at the city’s vocational arts school, graduating in architecture. She designed humanitarian housing, kindergartens, schools, and more – in Frankfurt, and then in Stalinist Magnitogorsk. Under the Nazis, she left her safe Istanbul exile for Vienna to contact the communist resistance, but was arrested and imprisoned for more than four years. Post-war Austria was not kind to communists, though she found work in Bulgaria, China, Cuba and the GDR. She refused an honour from former Wehrmacht intelligence officer Kurt Waldheim and sued the drunk-driving right-wing populist Jörg Haider, living to the age of 102.

ÁGOTA KRISTÓF (1935–2011) left her native Hungary in 1956 after Soviet tanks put down the uprising there. She escaped to Switzerland and eventually learned French, which became the language she wrote in. She described her writing as “revenge for my sad life as a housewife and worker” – and it enabled her to quit her job in a watch factory and leave her first husband. She wrote prose and plays about herself and her fellow Hungarians, the scourge of war on civilians, the pain of exile – brimming “not just with murder and incest and bestiality but with slippery doubles, falsehoods, and jolting narrative tricks.” Her work won prizes all over Europe, was adapted into films and inspired a video game.

HANNAH CULLWICK (1833-1909) was a domestic servant in Victorian England. We know about her life because of her unconventional relationship with a barrister and philanthropist, who encouraged her to keep prolific diaries. She started working at age eight and was orphaned at fourteen, taking jobs in different households around the country. She identified strongly with her role as a working-class woman and took pride in her physical strength. Hannah and her eventual husband shared a fetish for dirt, and she was particularly keen to role-play master and servant scenarios. They embraced the emerging photography industry, Hannah adopting many different guises that tell us even more about her. Despite her later financial comfort, she continued working until shortly before her death.