Gerrit Jurda

The cycle of revenge and retribution is endless. Every drop of blood spilt has to be atoned for with more. Everyone thinks they have the law and the will of the gods on their side and this conviction drives them on to commit new injustices. This is the spiral of violence that grips the ruling house of the Atrides in Aeschylus’s «Agamemnon», the first part of his trilogy «The Oresteia».

One stormy night in 1836, Hans Christian Andersen arrives uninvited at the home of his childhood friend Edvard Collin, who is to marry his fiancée Henriette the next day. Andersen has travelled through the wind and the rain to once again confess his love for Edvard. The family provide a frosty reception and the groom himself is out celebrating his last night as a bachelor. Only Henriette feels attracted to the unconventional charm of their guest, who lives in a fantasy world continually surrounded by characters from his own fairy tales. He magically transforms a sober room into a sparkling underwater landscape and castles of otherworldly beauty. And he starts telling his friend’s fiancée the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid: burning with love for a Prince, she wishes to become human and is willing to sacrifice her voice and her home to do so – risking her life.

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.

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s. 

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s.

Yasmina Reza, the celebrated author of hit social comedies such as «The God of Carnage» and «Life x 3» and bestselling novels – most recently «Serge» – has written a new play that incisively dramatises the profound problems of understanding that increasingly dominate relations between generations.

Maria Stuart, the deposed queen of Scotland, seeks asylum in England but soon finds herself imprisoned in a fortress as her aunt, the English queen Elisabeth Tudor, begins to investigate her. When she was seventeen, Maria was allegedly involved in the murder of her husband – that is the official charge, but there are also rumours of a plot to seize the crown right now. Schiller portrays neither of his female protagonists in a particularly flattering light: Maria is an impulsive seductress, Elisabeth is a jealous and indecisive monarch.

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?

Following Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, in the second half of the season another we hear from another master storyteller. A narrator who tells us to call him Ismael walks onto the Residenztheater stage in seaman’s garb. What follows is a genuine monster of a story: Ismael is hired on the «Pequod», an old whaling ship, and goes to sea on board this floating blubber factory.

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

Tessa Ensler is a tough defence lawyer. In her early thirties she has managed what very few people believed she could: she has made her way from an underprivileged background to an elite university and on to a top legal firm. She specializes in defending cases of sexual assault. Is her rate of acquittals so high because she is a woman, as is rumoured – or is it because she is so good at spotting holes and contradictions in the statements of the female victims?

The wedding of Theseus and Hippolyta is just around the corner. But first Theseus has to help his friend Egeus. His daughter Hermia has fallen in love with the wrong man, Lysander. In order to change Hermia's mind, an effective threat is set up. The lovers have only one choice: to flee into the darkness of a dreamy June night. And here, in the pale glow of the wild setting, reality and reason are transformed into sexual desire and animal lust. «A Midsummer Night's Dream» is not only William Shakespeare's best-known comedy, but also perhaps his most abysmal. Stephan Kimmig stages the creatures from Shakespeare's famous fairy world as real-life eccentrics. Weird, unconventional and dazzling, they radically question what is considered normal.

In his historical miniatures, Stefan Zweig brings together brilliant achievements in European history that tell of unbreakable vitality as well as human weaknesses. In Thom Luz' poetic and musical production, they become archive material that is explored, sung about, brought to life in brief moments and also set in relation to Stefan Zweig's own biography and his journey into exile in Brazil.

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.