Linda Blümchen

A caretaker is murdered with no reason or motive. Alienated from himself and life in general by a working day that is always the same, a bank clerk seizes an axe and commits murder. This action lacking any obvious cause shocks state prosecutor Martin, who is in charge of the case. In the murder and his crime he can see a reflection of his own imprisonment in a bourgeois existence dominated by duty, law and order. The prosecutor is immediately struck by an existential fear that drives him to escape into the fairy tale world of a mysterious alter ego: the world of Count Öderland.

Medea is the most startling character in the history of literature. Like no other female figure, she leaves an unprecedented trail of blood behind her: betraying her father, murdering her brother, murdering the King of Iolcus – and that is not enough.

One stormy night in 1836, Hans Christian Andersen arrives uninvited at the home of his childhood friend Edvard Collin, who is to marry his fiancée Henriette the next day. Andersen has travelled through the wind and the rain to once again confess his love for Edvard. The family provide a frosty reception and the groom himself is out celebrating his last night as a bachelor. Only Henriette feels attracted to the unconventional charm of their guest, who lives in a fantasy world continually surrounded by characters from his own fairy tales. He magically transforms a sober room into a sparkling underwater landscape and castles of otherworldly beauty. And he starts telling his friend’s fiancée the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid: burning with love for a Prince, she wishes to become human and is willing to sacrifice her voice and her home to do so – risking her life.

Seven years after her production of «Oedipus», the Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik now brings the next instalment of the Theban myths to the Resi stage: both a political thriller and an epic family drama.

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.

No other play by Heinrich von Kleist inspires quite so many superlatives as «Käthchen of Heilbronn». It is not only the most successful, but also the most romantic, the most fairy tale-like and at the same time the most mysterious play that he wrote.

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.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.