Constanze Kargl

Judge Adam has a serious problem: not only does he have to cope with the severe effects of his nightly alcohol consumption, but also the sudden appearance of his superior Walter, who intends to take a close look at the administration of law in the provinces. Adam is forced to try a case publicly in court where he is obliged to investigate himself, which uses all the means at his disposal to conceal. Kleist’s disturbing comedy turns into an investigative drama about a veritable legal scandal.

The Austrian playwright Werner Schwab is regarded as a radical reviver of the folk play and a linguistic virtuoso. For his comedy «Die Präsidentinnen», he created three incomparable female characters in Erna, Grete and Mariedl who try to defend their modest place in life with peasant cunning and a will to survive only to be tripped up by their own vainglorious delusions.  

With her great monologue «Anne-Marie the Beauty», the internationally most-performed contemporary playwright Yasmina Reza has written an eulogy to the art of acting, at the centre of which an almost-diva speaks out against her insignificance without dot or comma: Robert Dölle in a humorous and touching play-within-a-play.

The Jewish author Anna Gmeyner, rediscovered only a few years ago – she was forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933 – tells the story of the big world in miniature in Automatenbüfett. While Mrs Adam tries to keep her vending machine restaurant running, Mr Adam pursues his supposedly revolutionary economic vision, which is supposed to serve the good of all. However, with the appearance of the unknown Eva, the eternal order of the small town begins to falter.

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. 

During the global economic crisis of the 1920s, a young woman tries out self-realization and yet ends up in a restrictive marriage, confronted with misogyny and male bonding as well as the rise of National Socialism. Elsa-Sophie Jach adapts Marieluise Fleisser's only novel for the stage.

»Two souls dwell, oh! in my breast« – with these words Goethe’s Faust describes not only a personal drama, but an experience of modern subjectivity: the ego manifests itself as a texture of contradictory forces.  Goethe’s drama presents modern man as driven by a principle of continuous escalation – caught between self-control, consumerism and destruction. Ulrich Rasche presents these events as an interiorised chamber play. Its characters embody the forces of a conflicted consciousness; Mephisto becomes a dark shadow of the protagonist himself.

»The Oppermanns« was the first German novel to present an almost photographically accurate description of the radical changes in everyday life in Germany between November 1932 and the summer of 1933: based on newspaper and eyewitness accounts, Lion Feuchtwanger uses an analytical eye and literary skills to relate how the Nazi regime goes about systematically reorganising society and step by step undermines everything that one dynasty of an assimilated Jewish family have built their lives on.

Imagine that you haven’t been born yet. And imagine too that your whole life so far is unimportant. Just like all the opportunities you might have missed or bad decisions you might have made. Leave it all behind you. In «Now or Never» we are going to make a completely fresh start!

A warrior of God, heretic, saint: at an early age Jeanne d’Arc heard voices that commanded her in God’s name to defend France against England in the Hundred Years War. She helped the feudal state under King Charles VII to victory before falling into the hands of the English, being accused of heresy, convicted and burnt at the stake aged nineteen. Friedrich Schiller presents her martyrdom, »subordinates the historical truth to the laws of poetry« and creates – in Thomas Mann’s words – a consummate »opera in words«.

The Oktoberfest is a place of amusement and welcome distraction, even in the midst of the global economic crisis of the early 1930s. But it is a place that puts the love between Casimir, a redundant chauffeur, and Caroline, an office worker, to the test. In the world of the petit bourgeois, people seek comfort in alcoholic excess as the hour gets late and the chasms between them are revealed.  Horváth’s kaleidoscope of characters, whose monstrosity lies in their banality, shows the people of their time and how they are subject to economic necessity.

Intrigues, conspiracies, political intrigues - Schiller's tragedy depicts the power struggle between the English Queen Elizabeth I and the Scottish Queen Mary Stuart. But what if only chance decides between power and powerlessness? Then the roles could also be «swapped». For each performance, a draw is held to decide which of the two actresses will play the victor or the vanquished.

Two provincial housewives arrange to meet two men in animal costumes for anonymous sex in the ladies’ toilets at a motorway service station so that they can unleash their own animal instincts at last. Their husbands find out about it, put on the costumes and instead of having »beastly good sex« the women are left only with the realisation that instead of a bit on the side, they have just had monogamous sex again. With this comedy Elfriede Jelinek wrote a feminist travesty of Mozart’s »Così van tutte«, varying the classic tropes of nature and culture. 

Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, who they neither know who he is nor what they actually want from him. With his ambiguous work about waiting and the passing of time, which has been interpreted in all directions, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett created one of the classics of modernism, which in-house director Claudia Bauer reinterprets.

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.