Max Rothbart

Ulrich Rasche stages «Agamemnon» - the first part of Aeschylus' famous «Oresteia» - as a visually stunning cycle of revenge. With Rasche, language, music and acting become an overall experience, making the power and topicality of the ancient material all the more vivid.

Mit Hilfe von John Cages Zufallsprinzip liest sich das Ensemble durch seine umfangreiche Korrespondenz. Ausschnitte aus Briefen, u.a. Liebesbriefe an Merce Cunningham, persönliche Anekdoten sowie Reflexionen seines Werks treffen auf szenische Elemente und leuchten in jeder Aufführung neue Facetten seines Lebens und Schaffens aus.

Copenhagen’s working-class district of Vesterbro in the 1920s has little room for the talent and dreams of young Tove. She leaves school at the age of fourteen and is sent against her will to work as a maid and later as a clerical worker. However, she refuses to give up, publishes her early poems and stories and continues to seek her freedom as a writer. In the «Copenhagen Trilogy» Tove Ditlevsen uses her own biography to tell of an escape from a complicated everyday reality into storytelling, skilfully interweaving fiction and reality. Her first-person narrator, with whom she shares a name, delivers a humorous and laconic account of a personal life that is nevertheless political. 

During the global economic crisis of the 1920s, a young woman tries out self-realization and yet ends up in a restrictive marriage, confronted with misogyny and male bonding as well as the rise of National Socialism. Elsa-Sophie Jach adapts Marieluise Fleisser's only novel for the stage.

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.

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.

Imagine that you haven’t been born yet. And imagine too that your whole life so far is unimportant. Just like all the opportunities you might have missed or bad decisions you might have made. Leave it all behind you. In «Now or Never» we are going to make a completely fresh start!

«Peer, you’re lying!»: Henrik Ibsen immediately highlights the key theme of his dramatic poem  in its opening line – the blurred boundary between illusion and reality. Because Peer, whose youth is shaped by the poverty of his farming background, continually reinvents himself with the aid of stories, lies and the arts of fabulation – as a cosmopolitan, a colonial master and even an Emperor.

In Stephan Kimmig's production, the boundaries between Shakespeare's fairy world and the harsh reality of the big city become blurred. Fuelled by Puck's magic, a summer night unfolds in which soon no one knows where love ends and obsession begins.

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.

Vladimir and Estragon are waiting for Godot, who they neither know who he is nor what they actually want from him. With his ambiguous work about waiting and the passing of time, which has been interpreted in all directions, Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett created one of the classics of modernism, which in-house director Claudia Bauer reinterprets.