Naffie Janha

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. 

Asiimwe Deborah Kawe's play tells the story of the life's work of an undocumented immigrant. Like so many others, the nurse Achen, the author's main character, contributes with her labour and as a taxpayer to the prosperity of a country that has decided to expel her overnight.

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.

Ostend – the Atlantic coast, driving snow, New Year’s Eve, in the foyer of a hotel whose best days are behind it. This is where Minetti, an old «theatre artist», ends up lonely – and yet surrounded by a group of «madmen». Or are they like minds? Celebrating, wearing masks, drunk … of whom we do not know where they come from or where they are going to – they all pass across the hotel foyer like creatures from another world… Is this a comedy? Or a tragedy?

After many years, Gregers returns to his home country. His father, a successful entrepreneur, offers him the opportunity to join the company management, from which he has to retire for health reasons. Gregers refuses and at the same time learns that his father is secretly financially supporting the family of his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal, who lives in the most modest of circumstances, and becomes suspicious. Why is the capitalist suddenly showing himself to be a philanthropist? In his tragedy, Henrik Ibsen shows how the capitalist system has a direct impact on the private sphere and undermines social cohesion. The Norwegian Johannes Holmen Dahl, one of the most sought-after directors in Scandinavia, is now staging his German debut with a major work by his famous compatriot.

What happens with dementia and how can we deal with this phenomenon? Director Anna Karasińska and journalist Jürgen Berger explore the disease in a poetic evening of theatre that highlights the fragility of human existence and our basic assumptions of identity. Their search for clues leads them to a dementia village in Thailand, where care is provided in a completely different way to that in German care homes.