Constanze Kargl

It is centred on Argan, who not only imagines he is ill, he actually is: he is suffering from hypochondria. As a result, he cannot and will not relate to his social surroundings any differently than he does to his misfortune, which he circles in tyrannical self-reflection. With «The Imaginary Invalid», the Cologne-based writer and musician PeterLicht writes his fourth new version of Molière: in his customary playful language he dissects both the individual body and the body of society and breaks the final taboo of neoliberal self-optimisers – that of mortality.

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.

Seven years after her production of «Oedipus», the Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik now brings the next instalment of the Theban myths to the Resi stage: both a political thriller and an epic family drama.

One night a stranger named K. enters a village guest house. He is told that no one is allowed to stay in the village without permission from the authorities in the castle just outside it. K. identifies himself as a surveyor who has been hired by the castle only to be informed three days later that no surveyor is required and it is not even certain that one was ever sent for. For reasons that are unclear and against his wishes, K. is given the job of school caretaker, even though he also receives a letter from the castle confirming that his work as a surveyor was entirely satisfactory. While the castle administration operates in a dubious manner and the decisions of its officials appear arbitrary, the veracity of K.’s incoherent statements is equally subject to doubt.

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. 

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.

«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.

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.

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.