Max Rothbart

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.

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.

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 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.