Jonas Alsleben

The Austrian playwright Werner Schwab is regarded as a radical reviver of the folk play and a linguistic virtuoso. For his comedy «Die Präsidentinnen», he created three incomparable female characters in Erna, Grete and Mariedl who try to defend their modest place in life with peasant cunning and a will to survive only to be tripped up by their own vainglorious delusions.  

Rainald Goetz, the remarkable multi award-winning author, has entrusted resident director Elsa-Sophie Jach with the world premiere of his latest theatre text. The text is a bold mix of genres: a diary and requiem interwoven with scenes from a crazy screenplay project with Helmut Dietl and Franz Xaver Kroetz, to whom Goetz has dedicated the play. And in it he also pays his respects to his native Bavaria, both to the city of Munich and the foothills of the Alps. Playful, poetic, profound, absolutely undramatic – and, of course, a work of genius.

The fawn Bambi was not created by Walt Disney, but by the Viennese writer Felix Salten. As a passionate hunter he described the rough cycle of life from Bambi’s birth to an advanced age in his »Life Stories from the Forest« from 1922. The musician and director Schorsch Kamerun tells how every new day in the forest represents an existential challenge for the animal world with his ensemble in a colourful and dangerous revue.

Copenhagen’s working-class district of Vesterbro in the 1920s has little room for the talent and dreams of young Tove. She leaves school at the age of fourteen and is sent against her will to work as a maid and later as a clerical worker. However, she refuses to give up, publishes her early poems and stories and continues to seek her freedom as a writer. In the «Copenhagen Trilogy» Tove Ditlevsen uses her own biography to tell of an escape from a complicated everyday reality into storytelling, skilfully interweaving fiction and reality. Her first-person narrator, with whom she shares a name, delivers a humorous and laconic account of a personal life that is nevertheless political. 

Hollywood, glamour, seduction: Mara becomes a star in the game «Daddy». But the deeper she immerses herself in the dazzling dream world, the more the boundaries between reality and fiction become blurred. Marion Siéfert and Matthieu Bareyre transform the stage into a virtual playing field and expose the promises and abysses of the digital world.

The «freedom to act» forms the core of Jean-Paul Sartre's philosophical thinking. What this freedom means for the individual is exemplified in «The Flies» - Sartre's rewriting of Aeschylus' second part of the «Oresteia». Should Orest, who has returned home from exile, take revenge for the murder of his father Agamemnon? And if so, what price is he prepared to pay?

A longtime favourite of Munich audiences, the exceptional actor Manfred Zapatka, appears as one of William Shakespeare’s great title characters: King Lear. The play is a character study of an ageing, unpredictable patriarch and tyrant. 

At Whitsun the lion king Nobel invites his subjects to his court for an early summer celebration. The entire animal kingdom gathers – ranging from the crane to the wolf and the bear. Only one animal is missing: the fox called Reineke. As soon as his name his mentioned, the mood of harmony vanishes. One angry accusation follows another and Reinike the fox is charged in his absence with a series of incredible crimes. The cockerel, for example, complains of losing his wife and children – Reineke ate them for supper. When he is eventually put on trial, the accomplished liar – an animal equivalent of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – manages to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes – man, woman or creature – and slip his neck out of the noose. Eventually he even acquires a whole crowd of followers and is elected Chancellor.

The moral of the story is that not everyone with foxy cunning and a talent for oratory puts those gifts to benevolent use – on the contrary! But how can we tell the difference between truth and lies? How can we avoid being taken in by the peddlers of fake news? How can we remain faithful to our own opinions and values?

Romeo and Juliet set the language of love against the war of their relatives, the language of the dagger. Will they manage to set an example against the irreconcilable enmity that prevails in Verona? In-house director Elsa-Sophie Jach re-stages the world's most famous love story and the dance on the volcano that sweeps its main characters away, with lots of music and hot hearts.