Christoph Franken

It is centred on Argan, who not only imagines he is ill, he actually is: he is suffering from hypochondria. As a result, he cannot and will not relate to his social surroundings any differently than he does to his misfortune, which he circles in tyrannical self-reflection. With «The Imaginary Invalid», the Cologne-based writer and musician PeterLicht writes his fourth new version of Molière: in his customary playful language he dissects both the individual body and the body of society and breaks the final taboo of neoliberal self-optimisers – that of mortality.

In «Archive of Tears» Magdalena Schrefel invents a commemorative space that preserves the most fleeting signs of human feelings – tears. This universal, human, salty secretion that leaks from the organs of our sight, the eyes, seems to combine the body and emotion, the mind and chemistry in an almost alchemical fashion: feelings – of movement, grief or joy – are translated into a physical language.

With sharp-witted and pleasurable writing, Kevin Rittberger demonstrates why climate targets will never be achieved under the current economic regime, that work is self-defeating if it makes people ill and that the model of blood-based kinship is outmoded due to the current state of medicine and technology.

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.