Nora Schlocker
Born in Rum, Austria, in 1983, Nora Schlocker trained as a theatre director at the Hochschule für Schauspielkunst «Ernst Busch» in Berlin. From 2008 to 2011 she was Resident Director at the Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar and from 2011 to 2014 at the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus. She also created works at the Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin, the Vienna Schauspielhaus, Stuttgart State Theatre, the Residenztheater, Centraltheater Leipzig, Nationaltheater Mannheim, the Deutsches Theater Berlin and Staatsschauspiel Dresden. She became Resident Director at Theater Basel in 2015. Here her productions included world premieres of two plays by Ewald Palmetshofer: «Edward II. I am Love» after Christopher Marlowe, a co-production with the Vienna Schauspielhaus and the Wiener Festwochen, which was invited to the Swiss Theatertreffen in 2016, and «Before Sunrise» after Gerhart Hauptmann, which was invited to the 43rd Mülheimer Theatertagen and the Heidelberger Stückemarkt in 2018.
She has been Resident Director at the Residenztheater since the 2019/2020 season.
Productions
The most frequently performed contemporary international playwright Yazmina Reza, acclaimed for her plays’ witty dialogue, wrote «Anne-Marie the Beauty» as a full-length monologue for her favourite actor André Marcon. This elogy for the art of acting centres on an ageing actress who has spent her entire life in the theatre playing small and minor roles and has never been able to progress beyond this obscure existence.
Anne-Marie die Schönheit (ANNE-MARIE THE BEAUTY)
The Italian writer Davide Enia is invited to a literary festival in Munich by his German colleague Albert Ostermaier – who suggests that he bring with him a text about the situation of the refugees in Southern Italy. For the Sicilian Enia, this is a pretext to travel to the island of Lampedusa, which he knows only as a holidaymaker. By October 2013 at the latest, when a shipwreck nearby caused hundreds of people to lose their lives, the island had become a shocking symbol of the European Union’s inability to prevent refugees dying in the Mediterranean Sea.
Finsternis (THE ABYSS)
Maria Stuart, the deposed queen of Scotland, seeks asylum in England but soon finds herself imprisoned in a fortress as her aunt, the English queen Elisabeth Tudor, begins to investigate her. When she was seventeen, Maria was allegedly involved in the murder of her husband – that is the official charge, but there are also rumours of a plot to seize the crown right now. Schiller portrays neither of his female protagonists in a particularly flattering light: Maria is an impulsive seductress, Elisabeth is a jealous and indecisive monarch.
Maria Stuart
Tessa Ensler is a tough defence lawyer. In her early thirties she has managed what very few people believed she could: she has made her way from an underprivileged background to an elite university and on to a top legal firm. She specializes in defending cases of sexual assault. Is her rate of acquittals so high because she is a woman, as is rumoured – or is it because she is so good at spotting holes and contradictions in the statements of the female victims?
Prima Facie