Juliane Köhler

In her autobiographical memoir «A Girl’s Story», published in 2016, the French writer Annie Ernaux attempts to understand a deeply formative experience in her own life. What happened to her, a young woman aged 18 at the time, in the summer of 1958? Between fragments of memories, diary entries, letters and decades-old photos, the author undertakes an almost forensic analysis of what happened, its effects and the social frameworks and sexual double standards that grant or refuse entirely different forms of «freedom» to men and women respectively. «A Girl’s Story» shows an almost 80-year-old woman painfully confronting sexual shame, impotence and self-empowerment and is – shortly before the #MeToo movement arose – a touching and highly political document of putting an end to silence.

Successful playwright Lot Vekemans hits the nerve of the times with her new play. With great sensitivity, she tells the story of a father and daughter, played by Manfred Zapatka and Juliane Köhler, who have seemingly irreconcilable attitudes to social and political issues, and asks how these conflicts can be overcome.

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.

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.