Evelyne Gugolz

Claire Fletcher, the priest of a small town, becomes the witness and victim of an act that defies comprehension. During a rehearsal of the community choir she conducts, a young man kills several choir members. Since this happened, nothing is as it was and a return to normality seems impossible.

In each performance the characters appear on stage with a different choir from the Munich area.

The director Elsa-Sophie Jach, who recently made her debut at the Residenztheater with her production of Herbert Achternbusch’s «Heart of Glass», brings the outrageous love poetry of «Europe’s first poet» to new life. Known for a directing style characterised by precise language and strong visuals, she hunts down the forgotten remains of Sappho’s poems, condenses them into a chorus and, on a tour through the literary canon together with the Munich techno live band SLATEC, she exposes the systematic erasure of the female voice, its silencing and the need for it to empower itself.

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 «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.

After fifteen years in exile, Orestes returns incognito to his home city of Argos – the same city in which his father Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his victorious return from Troy. However, desire for revenge is not the reason for his spontaneous homecoming – it is the rumour of a mysterious plague of flies. When his sister Electra persuades him to stay, it gradually dawns on him that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are not only cruelly oppressing the people, they have also implicated him in Agamemnon’s murder. Only then does Orestes decide to take action.

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.