Constanze Kargl

Anna Gmeyner’s «Automatenbüfett» satirises all the «important» people of a small town and the larger world in microcosm. This elite group of men gathers daily in Mrs Adam’s automated buffet, a «restaurant» where food and drink may only be available at the push of a button, but one can nevertheless argue splendidly about politics. However, when the idea of factory farming fish is proposed, all these opponents suddenly start pulling in the same direction.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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!

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.

«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.

Austrian playwright Ewald Palmetshofer translates Shakespeare's royal drama «King Henry IV» into the present day of eroding democracies with sophisticated language and defiant humour.

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.

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.