Katrin Michaels

This new work by the Italian director Silvia Costa combines two plays by Marguerite Duras, the grande dame of French literature. While in «La Musica», on the evening after their divorce, a couple take a realistic look back at the life they shared and imagine what might have happened if they had stayed together, «The English Lover» presents the nightmare version of the end of a relationship, in which violence that has been smouldering for years erupts.

Freddie Mercury, front man of the legendary British rock band Queen, spent a lot of time in Munich from 1979 to 1985. He lived in several apartments here, forged close friendships and recorded his first solo album. What drew him to the Isar? Love, the wild nightlife and the many meeting points of the city’s gay community? The Musicland Studios of Giorgio Moroder and their pioneering innovations in electronic music? Or did he simply want to avoid the rigid British tax laws?

Only recently rediscovered, «Recitatif» is a literary sensation: the only short story by the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Toni Morrison. In it, two young women meet: Roberta and Twyla, both from poor backgrounds, meet in an orphanage and become friends. They are repeatedly brought together by chance, and we learn about their men, their jobs and their children in a series of snapshots. In the end they stand on opposite sides of a protest against racial segregation. But the author leaves open which of the two is white and which is Black.

«Yes - No», «Light - Dark», «There - Away», «Breakfast or not», «War or not» - author Nele Stuhler has collected lists of opposites that question the depths of everyday life as well as the very big world situation and put them into poem form. A poetic and highly comical concert of contradictions performed by three actors on an open stage.

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».

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.

Romeo and Juliet set the language of love against the war of their relatives, the language of the dagger. Will they manage to set an example against the irreconcilable enmity that prevails in Verona? In-house director Elsa-Sophie Jach re-stages the world's most famous love story and the dance on the volcano that sweeps its main characters away, with lots of music and hot hearts.

Jovana Reisinger’s novel follows nine women from early spring to the summer of an unspecified year not far from the present. All of them live in or around Munich and they are all named after women’s magazines. They live and fail representatively, each of them alone and yet collectively, by the images and ideals of what it means to be a woman.

In his historical miniatures, Stefan Zweig brings together brilliant achievements in European history that tell of unbreakable vitality as well as human weaknesses. In Thom Luz' poetic and musical production, they become archive material that is explored, sung about, brought to life in brief moments and also set in relation to Stefan Zweig's own biography and his journey into exile in Brazil.

What happens with dementia and how can we deal with this phenomenon? Director Anna Karasińska and journalist Jürgen Berger explore the disease in a poetic evening of theatre that highlights the fragility of human existence and our basic assumptions of identity. Their search for clues leads them to a dementia village in Thailand, where care is provided in a completely different way to that in German care homes.