Michael Gumpinger

Elisabeth Gärtner, a retired architect, has only one more wish: she wants to die. Her beloved husband died of cancer three years ago and without him life has no meaning for her any more. A drug that would allow her to die of her own volition has been refused her. Now the Ethics Council must make a decision on her case. Expert witnesses from the fields of law, medicine and theology argue over the question:  Does a human being have a right to determine their own death? Are doctors allowed to help someone commit suicide? And who do our lives actually belong to? To us? To the state? Or to God?

In her artistic work, Marion Siéfert searches for theater in the depths of our increasingly digitalized reality. She uses the stage and its long tradition of playing with identity to create a world in which reality and fiction blur into one another, but at the same time brutally collide. In this gamified parallel world, she encounters dozens of players who increasingly cast a spell over her. Among them is twenty-seven-year-old Julien, who invites her to try out the newly released game «Daddy».

A prince of fashion and a fairy-tale king. A bird of paradise and a cult figure. A Munich original and a philanthropist. During the course of his lifetime, Rudolph Moshammer was given countless of these nicknames and soubriquets. Everyone recognized him as an eccentric with his dog Daisy on his arm, a talk show guest and man of society. Like his role model, Bavaria’s fairy-tale king Ludwig II, he loved glamour, opulence, and excess. In his appearances as an actor and in advertisements, as a singer in the preliminary round for the Eurovision Song Contest and with books like «Mama und ich» (Mama and Me), he became a cult figure and his fashion boutique «Carnaval de Venise» in Maximilianstraße became a cult address and place of pilgrimage for Mosi fans.

In her new work, the director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen four times and is renowned for her work with fast and furious acting ensembles, now tackles someone who typifies Munich, the brilliant comedian Karl Valentin. In her usual, opulent stage language she will devise a homage to the Bavarian whose anarchic approach to language led the critic Alfred Kerr to invent the term «Wortzerklauberer», someone who steals words and tears them to pieces.

In Beckett's 1948 classic of absurd theatre, the main characters wait in an open field, torn between a mood of optimism and resignation, for the ominous Godot. In laconic language, Beckett creates one of the most famous and ambiguous pairs of comedians in theatre literature, reinterpreted by in-house director Claudia Bauer.