Florian von Manteuffel

After «The Three Musketeers», who continue to gallop across the Residenztheater stage, the Italian director Antonio Latella and his co-writer and dramaturg Federico Bellini now tackle the second great classic about famous swordsmen.  They take Rostand’s play as the starting point for research into the nature of theatre and love, in which instead of the more than fifty characters presented in the original, only two performers stand on stage. The two men now have to tell the story without the object of their desires and have no muse to inspire their verses.

«Danton’s Death», written by the 22-year-old Georg Büchner in a mere five weeks in 1835 following extensive research, is based on historical sources and documents from the French Revolution, whose maxims of «liberty, equality and fraternity» shaped our understanding of modern European democracies. However, Büchner does not tell of the triumphant beginnings, the storming of the Bastille as part of a popular uprising that continues to be celebrated today, focusing instead on a few days towards the end of the Jacobins’ so-called reign of terror in the spring of 1794.

The Australian writer and director Simon Stone took Chekhov’s famous play as the starting point for his rewriting – voted «Play of the Year 2017» in «Theater heute» magazine – that combines rapid fire dialogue, subtle character studies and the ambivalence that arises from them while locating the play thematically in the here and now.

Georg Büchner’s fragile fragment, one of the most important dramas in German literature, is based on the case of the soldier Woyzeck, who murdered his lover and was sentenced to death in 1824. Büchner was familiar with the facts of this historic criminal case which were detailed in legal, medical and psychological reports. He shows a murder of jealousy and the events that lead up to it: Woyzeck, «a good chap and a poor devil», forced onto the lowest level of society financially, humiliated by his superiors, experimented upon by science, is exposed to a radical lack of empathy from the world around him. As a result, he becomes guilty, once his fears, instincts and desires break out obscenely from inside him.

One night a stranger named K. enters a village guest house. He is told that no one is allowed to stay in the village without permission from the authorities in the castle just outside it. K. identifies himself as a surveyor who has been hired by the castle only to be informed three days later that no surveyor is required and it is not even certain that one was ever sent for. For reasons that are unclear and against his wishes, K. is given the job of school caretaker, even though he also receives a letter from the castle confirming that his work as a surveyor was entirely satisfactory. While the castle administration operates in a dubious manner and the decisions of its officials appear arbitrary, the veracity of K.’s incoherent statements is equally subject to doubt.

With «Success», we journey into the inner workings of a society in which everything is measured in terms of personal career advantage, the demands of embittered contemporaries, hatred of one’s neighbours, anger at those with a different political opinion and one’s own lack of any sense of direction.

Following Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in the second half of the season another we hear from another master storyteller. A narrator who tells us to call him Ismael walks onto the Residenztheater stage in seaman’s garb. What follows is a genuine monster of a story: Ismael is hired on the «Pequod», an old whaling ship, and goes to sea on board this floating blubber factory.

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

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.