Elsa-Sophie Jach
Elsa-Sophie Jach was born in 1991 in Vorwerk, in the district of Rotenburg (Wümme). She studied Directing at the Hamburg Theatre Academy and Creative Writing for the Stage at Berlin University of the Arts. Productions she directed as a student were presented at the 100°-Festival at Ballhaus Ost and Kampnagel in Hamburg. Since graduating in 2018 she has created further work at the Schauspielhaus Hamburg. The production «The Third Republic» which she created together with the writer Thomas Köck at the Thalia Theater Hamburg was invited to the Volkstheater in Munich for the 2019 Festival Radikal Jung. This was followed in 2019 by «Six Suitcases» by Maxim Biller at the Thalia Theater Hamburg, «Summer» by Sean Keller at the Vienna Schauspielhaus and «Accessories» by Enis Maci at Theater Bamberg. In 2020 she directed «Kudlich in America. or who owns history. a carbon-democratic spaghetti western» (together with Thomas Köck) at the Vienna Schauspielhaus and «Godless Youth» after Ödön von Horvàth at Theater Bamberg.
Productions
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.
Die Unerhörten (The outrageous ones)
Copenhagen’s working-class district of Vesterbro in the 1920s has little room for the talent and dreams of young Tove. She leaves school at the age of fourteen and is sent against her will to work as a maid and later as a clerical worker. However, she refuses to give up, publishes her early poems and stories and continues to seek her freedom as a writer. In the «Copenhagen Trilogy» Tove Ditlevsen uses her own biography to tell of an escape from a complicated everyday reality into storytelling, skilfully interweaving fiction and reality. Her first-person narrator, with whom she shares a name, delivers a humorous and laconic account of a personal life that is nevertheless political.
Die Kopenhagen-Trilogie (The Copenhagen Trilogy)
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.
Das Käthchen von Heilbronn (KÄTHCHEN OF HEILBRONN)
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.
Die Fliegen (the flies)
In her adaptation, the director Elsa-Sophie Jach has seized on the idea Goethe abandoned and transfers Goethe’s love-sick alter ego to the stage. «WERTHER. A Theatrical Folly» supplements Goethe’s shimmering, astonishingly modern rush of emotion with texts by one of his contemporaries: Karoline von Günderrode.
Werther