Snow has closed the only road down the mountain, and someone at the Haus Edelweiss is not as sick as they claim.
It is the winter of 1927 at the Haus Edelweiss, a sanatorium above Davos where the rich come to cough politely and the cure is mostly rest, cream and fresh air. An avalanche has closed the road for seven days. In that week a patient's file goes missing, a balcony door is found open at three in the morning, and the clinic's quiet rules begin to bend. Everyone here is waiting for a diagnosis of one kind or another, and not all of them want to hear it.
5 roles. You take one; your friends take the rest, and the narrator plays any left over. Anyone can bring a character of their own into a role instead.
A Viennese pianist's widow who has spent two years being told she is recovering and has started to suspect she is not.
The sanatorium's director, a brilliant physician whose cure rate is the envy of Switzerland and slightly too good to be true.
The head nurse, a farmer's daughter from the valley who runs the wards with a stopwatch and knows everyone's temperature and secrets.
An English novelist with a mild cough and a large advance, who came up the mountain to finish a book and has instead begun to write about everyone in it.
A Polish countess with a famous name, a fading fortune and a cough she treats as an accessory.