Thomas Lettow

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.

Hamsun’s trilogy tells the story of a man who feels he has been overlooked by the elites that set the tone and cheated of social recognition. The philosopher Ivar Kareno evolves from a 30-year-old radical and anti-liberal writer on the fringes of poverty into a 40-year-old private tutor to the two sons of a businessman in a distant coastal region. Here Kareno sits brooding in his writing tower, while an infectious fever descends on people, arriving from the North, the businessman Otermann is driven mad by his wealth and a strange man wanders between the houses, rumoured to be justice. Ten years later, the 50-year-old Kareno is still hoping for a major turning point in his life. And he will indeed reach a milestone where he must decide whether he will remain true to the radical ideas of his youth or to pursue a career that is more measured politically.   

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.

«Once the social order has been consolidated, anyone who is not alarmed by reality is as free as they wish,» Jean Jourdheuil wrote about Labiche’s work. But in this play, that alarm is felt: Lenglumé begins to realise what he might be capable of and as a result – at least for a day – his self-assurance and satisfaction crumble.