Katja Jung

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.

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.

In his plays, the Chilean director and playwright Guillermo Calderón achieves an entirely original combination of humour and political power. Many of his texts are highly comic tales of the prejudice, ignorance and egotism that come to light through intercultural exchange. His latest play for the Residenztheater tells of the efforts of a religious sect in Munich to advertise for a newly founded settlement in Chile.

Calderón’s play tells of how Basilio, King of Poland, is given a prophecy that Sigismund will rise up against him, so keeps him locked up like an animal in a tower. In Hofmannsthal’s new version, which is rediscovered for the stage here, the author departed radically from the Spanish original.

In her new work, the director Claudia Bauer, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen four times and is renowned for her work with fast and furious acting ensembles, now tackles someone who typifies Munich, the brilliant comedian Karl Valentin. In her usual, opulent stage language she will devise a homage to the Bavarian whose anarchic approach to language led the critic Alfred Kerr to invent the term «Wortzerklauberer», someone who steals words and tears them to pieces.