Barbara Horvath

Ulrich Rasche stages «Agamemnon» - the first part of Aeschylus' famous «Oresteia» - as a visually stunning cycle of revenge. With Rasche, language, music and acting become an overall experience, making the power and topicality of the ancient material all the more vivid.

PART I: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

PART II: PERESTROIKA

The mid-1980s: the outbreak of the disease AIDS alarms New York. Louis, son of a wealthy Jewish family, abandons his sick boyfriend Prior and starts a relationship with conservative Mormon lawyer Joe. When Joe’s drug-dependent wife Harper retreats into dreams of everlasting ice, his strictly religious mother flies in outraged from Salt Lake City. The Republican Roy Cohn, a cynical and power-obsessed lawyer, insists until his last breath that he is not gay and does not have AIDS. Even on his deathbed, he refuses to stop arguing about this with his black nurse Belize. And then an angel breaks through Prior’s bedroom ceiling.

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.

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.

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?

1937 in a fishing village after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Mrs. Carrar has forbidden her sons to join the fight against Franco. She desperately hopes to be spared war and terror. But how much longer can she protect herself and her sons? And what should she say to her brother, who demands that she hand over the guns hidden in the house and asks the all-important question: «If the sharks attack you, is it you who will use violence?» In Brecht's short play, everything revolves around the unsettling question of the possibility of neutral abstention. In his play «Choking Lead», playwright Björn SC Deigner continues Brecht's question in the present and searches for a language for the timeless horror of war and destruction.

Ishmael signs on to the «Pequod», an old whaler. However, it soon becomes clear that the aim of the voyage is not just to exploit the world's oceans and their giant marine mammals, but Captain Ahab's personal vendetta. Melville's «Moby Dick» - brought to the stage by Stefan Pucher - is both an adventurous sailor's yarn and a reflection on the fatal art of seduction of a demagogue.

22 voices talk about their mothers, becoming a mother, being a mother, never wanting to become a mother or not wanting to become a mother and not being able to become a mother. They intertwine to create a piece about decisions, doubts, (miscarriages) births, cancellations, transformations and courageous actions.

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.

In Stephan Kimmig's production, the boundaries between Shakespeare's fairy world and the harsh reality of the big city become blurred. Fuelled by Puck's magic, a summer night unfolds in which soon no one knows where love ends and obsession begins.