Sabine Lehman has built boats and sailed the oceans in them. She is a lapsed revolutionary, a theatre personality, a business executive, and has turned vegetarian recently. When Sabine left Berlin in the early 1970s as a graduate in performing arts, she had no idea that someday she would be living her life as a theatre actor and hotel executive in the Himalaya. But what is life, if not full of surprises?

Today, Sabine is the chief custodian of Kathmandu Valley\'s theatre circuit, with annual productions from her Studio 7 dealing with everything from Shakespearean classics to translated adaptations of Nepali historical novels. Over the years, Studio 7 has come to be known in Kathmandu for 20 or more brilliant shows with exquisite props, intriguing scripts, musical discoveries and a wealth of local talent.

Her most recent plays have been the English translation of The White Tiger by Diamond Sumshere Rana (1998), The Life ofMilerepa (1999), and The Hundred Thousand Songs of Milarepa (2000). The White Tiger got rave reviews, and brought alive to contemporary Kathmandu audiences the palace intrigues that accompanied the rise of Jang Bahadur Rana-events that have had a profound impact on who rules Nepal till now.

Sabine manages to seamlessly combine her acting hobby with the business chores of being Managing Director of Hotel Vajra. So how did a sailing enthusiast end up here in a landlocked Himalayan kingdom? The answer could be a Studio 7 production: Sabine was shipwrecked while in a boat she herself built while on a cruise from Australia to Surabaya in Indonesia. She ended up doing stage performances with her group, Theatre of All Possibilities, in Kerala. Then she happened to fly up to Kathmandu for an international mountain conference in 19^8. Sabine immediately decided this was the place for her: "I decided to leave the ocean and go up to the mountains."

Drama is escapism, and Sabine says it is a way for people to make believe and get away from the tired routines of everyday life. "Whether they are comic, tragic or romantic, dramas recreate moments of death and birth. It is a chance to step out of it for a moment and it does not matter whether that moment lasts for a second, a minute or an hour. It\'s what you felt then."

The stage is an arena for Sabine to ask a fundamentally existential question: "What is this great drama we are all in?