Verena Mayr

Heinrich Mann’s perceptive bildungsroman published in 1914 «The Loyal Subject» is a wickedly humorous portrait of the Wilhelmine Empire and its self-congratulatory middle classes with their nationalistic fantasies of being a great power. Mann’s protagonist Diederich Hessling is a spineless opportunist with no moral courage. He only forgets his insecurities at the stammtisch, working himself up to give great nationalistic speeches. However, Mann does not present Hessling as a joke – he is a complex but ultimately warped personality with a blind faith in authority.

Robert Icke has congenially translated Arthur Schnitzler's play «Professor Bernhardi» into the present day. The doctor Ruth Wolff not only comes into conflict with her colleagues and the maxims of the Catholic Church, but also into a media shitstorm. The «Times» of London celebrated «The Doctor» as an «open-heart operation on our present day, which gets more complicated the deeper you cut».

«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.

When Goethe set «Götz von Berlichingen» down on paper in 1771 in a true writing frenzy, the 22-year-old writer was still a complete unknown. This came to an abrupt end with the publication of «Götz», as suddenly the young poet was being talked about everywhere. Goethe’s early work is a powerful stage epic with over fifty locations, several plots running in parallel and a huge cast of characters. What is more: Goethe dispensed with all the customary conventions that 18^th century drama had been using up to that point.

A prince of fashion and a fairy-tale king. A bird of paradise and a cult figure. A Munich original and a philanthropist. During the course of his lifetime, Rudolph Moshammer was given countless of these nicknames and soubriquets. Everyone recognized him as an eccentric with his dog Daisy on his arm, a talk show guest and man of society. Like his role model, Bavaria’s fairy-tale king Ludwig II, he loved glamour, opulence, and excess. In his appearances as an actor and in advertisements, as a singer in the preliminary round for the Eurovision Song Contest and with books like «Mama und ich» (Mama and Me), he became a cult figure and his fashion boutique «Carnaval de Venise» in Maximilianstraße became a cult address and place of pilgrimage for Mosi fans.

You are how you speak. Professor of Phonetics Higgins makes a bet with his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers in the street to make ends meet and speaks the broadest dialect, into an upper-class lady with immaculate articulation. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented pupil who manages to pass the test of entering high society. Higgins attributes this success to his own genius and automatically lays claim to her. He fails to notice that his teaching has helped Eliza to become a self-aware and thoughtful woman who is not only capable of making her own decisions but of acting on them too.

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.

After many years, Gregers returns to his home country. His father, a successful entrepreneur, offers him the opportunity to join the company management, from which he has to retire for health reasons. Gregers refuses and at the same time learns that his father is secretly financially supporting the family of his old friend Hjalmar Ekdal, who lives in the most modest of circumstances, and becomes suspicious. Why is the capitalist suddenly showing himself to be a philanthropist? In his tragedy, Henrik Ibsen shows how the capitalist system has a direct impact on the private sphere and undermines social cohesion. The Norwegian Johannes Holmen Dahl, one of the most sought-after directors in Scandinavia, is now staging his German debut with a major work by his famous compatriot.