Nicola Mastroberardino

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s. 

New York City in the final months of the Obama Presidency. While the writer Toby Darling feverishly awaits the premiere of his play, his partner Eric Glass spends time with his acquaintance Walter. His conversations with the 55-year-old take Eric back to a past which as a gay man in his early thirties he only knows from hearsay: the devastating AIDS epidemic that rocked the LGBTQ community at the beginning of the 1980s.

The Three Musketeers, of whom there are actually four, appear and think about their loneliness. Can their famous slogan «One for all and all for one» be explained mathematically? Who is «the one» here? And who are «all»? They transform themselves into their own servants and horses and reconstruct Dumas’s story – and above all they question it. The musketeers are fighting for their lives and the actors are acting as if their lives depend on it.

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.

PART I: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

PART II: PERESTROIKA

The mid-1980s: the outbreak of the disease AIDS alarms New York. Louis, son of a wealthy Jewish family, abandons his sick boyfriend Prior and starts a relationship with conservative Mormon lawyer Joe. When Joe’s drug-dependent wife Harper retreats into dreams of everlasting ice, his strictly religious mother flies in outraged from Salt Lake City. The Republican Roy Cohn, a cynical and power-obsessed lawyer, insists until his last breath that he is not gay and does not have AIDS. Even on his deathbed, he refuses to stop arguing about this with his black nurse Belize. And then an angel breaks through Prior’s bedroom ceiling.

A caretaker is murdered with no reason or motive. Alienated from himself and life in general by a working day that is always the same, a bank clerk seizes an axe and commits murder. This action lacking any obvious cause shocks state prosecutor Martin, who is in charge of the case. In the murder and his crime he can see a reflection of his own imprisonment in a bourgeois existence dominated by duty, law and order. The prosecutor is immediately struck by an existential fear that drives him to escape into the fairy tale world of a mysterious alter ego: the world of Count Öderland.

Lola Montez was one of the most dazzling female figures in the history of Bavaria and the city of Munich. When Lola – who was actually born Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert – arrived in Munich in 1846, the immigration police recorded her as: «artist, dancer from Sevilla, Spain, 24 years old, Catholic, no passport.» A short time later she had become the lover of the Bavarian King Ludwig I. However, it would be too simple to reduce this fascinating woman to the scandals that were often no more than allegations against her: because in both her thinking and her actions she was centuries ahead of her time.

Medea is the most startling character in the history of literature. Like no other female figure, she leaves an unprecedented trail of blood behind her: betraying her father, murdering her brother, murdering the King of Iolcus – and that is not enough.

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.

The Australian playwright and director Simon Stone whose attention-grabbing contemporary interpretations of classic dramas have caused an international sensation, takes characters, narrative threads and motifs from Horváth’s works, catapults them into the present day and weaves them together into a touching, post-heroic panorama of human effort in times of crisis.

Georg Büchner’s fragile fragment, one of the most important dramas in German literature, is based on the case of the soldier Woyzeck, who murdered his lover and was sentenced to death in 1824. Büchner was familiar with the facts of this historic criminal case which were detailed in legal, medical and psychological reports. He shows a murder of jealousy and the events that lead up to it: Woyzeck, «a good chap and a poor devil», forced onto the lowest level of society financially, humiliated by his superiors, experimented upon by science, is exposed to a radical lack of empathy from the world around him. As a result, he becomes guilty, once his fears, instincts and desires break out obscenely from inside him.

«And often the outward signs of ascent only become apparent once the decline has begun again.» In his 1901 novel, subtitled «The Decline of a Family», Thomas Mann uses precise characterisation and an ironic style to describe the incipient structural collapse of the grande bourgeoisie. Mann drew his inspiration for «Buddenbrooks» from the story of his own family in Lübeck and people of the city where he was living at the time: Munich. Mann shows the potential complexity of relations between North and South Germany with considerable humour in the relationship between Tony Buddenbrook and the Munich hop-trader Alois Permaneder.

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.

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.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.