Cornelius Hunziker

Productions

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.

Drei Schwestern (Three sisters)
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Fri 31 May

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.

Engel in Amerika (Angels in America)

The author and musician PeterLicht frees this moral portrait that we now find barely legible from the socio-political reality of French absolutism and sets his sights on the present in his new version «Tartuffe or the Philosopher’s Swine». Here he employs the same characters as the original, whose literary descendants are nevertheless given considerable licence: in secular times one abhors a vacuum and so the «socially interconnected sculpture» hopes for and fears the appearance of Tartuffe, who serves to supply their wishes and as a surface onto which they may project themselves.

Tartuffe oder Das Schwein der Weisen (Tartuffe or the philosopher's swine)

Georg Büchner’s fragile fragment, one of the most important dramas in German literature, is based on the case of the soldier Woyzeck, who murdered his lover and was sentenced to death in 1824. Büchner was familiar with the facts of this historic criminal case which were detailed in legal, medical and psychological reports. He shows a murder of jealousy and the events that lead up to it: Woyzeck, «a good chap and a poor devil», forced onto the lowest level of society financially, humiliated by his superiors, experimented upon by science, is exposed to a radical lack of empathy from the world around him. As a result, he becomes guilty, once his fears, instincts and desires break out obscenely from inside him.

Woyzeck
WITH ENGLISH SURTITLES
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Today
Residenztheater, 18.30 o'clock
Sun 05 May