Katrin Michaels

After «The Three Musketeers», who continue to gallop across the Residenztheater stage, the Italian director Antonio Latella and his co-writer and dramaturg Federico Bellini now tackle the second great classic about famous swordsmen.  They take Rostand’s play as the starting point for research into the nature of theatre and love, in which instead of the more than fifty characters presented in the original, only two performers stand on stage. The two men now have to tell the story without the object of their desires and have no muse to inspire their verses.

The story, it seems, takes little time to tell: a prince and a princess from neighbouring kingdoms run away to escape from an arranged marriage, fall in love with each other incognito and try to use their cunning to be able to choose the path of their own lives for themselves – only to realise at the end that they have run straight into the fate that had already been arranged for them.

In his plays, the Chilean director and playwright Guillermo Calderón achieves an entirely original combination of humour and political power. Many of his texts are highly comic tales of the prejudice, ignorance and egotism that come to light through intercultural exchange. His latest play for the Residenztheater tells of the efforts of a religious sect in Munich to advertise for a newly founded settlement in Chile.

In the two volumes of poetry that were published before her early death, May Ayim finds a concise, poetic language with which she processes her experiences of racism and lack of understanding alongside her childhood and her desire for love, her joy and her sadness. She plays with sounds, methods of writing and letters, and yet always finds very clear words for what needs to change in Germany.

Ensemble member Valentino Dalle Mura has been a Batman fan ever since he was a child. After devouring hundreds of comics and every film version he could find over the course of two decades, he now shares his expert knowledge with the audience while also questioning what kind of image of a man and a hero he has been worshipping.

Bernard-Marie Koltès’s first text for theatre is a cryptic monologue that brought the French playwright instant fame in 1977: it shows a driven man searching for human contact.  In this production, the audience follows the actor Michael Wächter on his way through the city at night, listening to his interior monologue on headphones.

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.

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.

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.

«Let’s say someone comes up to you and tells you you’re such and such a person, tells you the worst, says the most appalling things, things that could kill someone, absolutely destroy them, leave them speechless and lifeless. And then you say: Yes, that’s what I’m like, it’s true, but … But so what?» – With these words Prince Philip attempts to break down the reserve of his new fiancée Yvonne, but they also describe the essential plot of this first play by the Polish author Witold Gombrowicz.