Lisa Stiegler

The director Elsa-Sophie Jach, who recently made her debut at the Residenztheater with her production of Herbert Achternbusch’s «Heart of Glass», brings the outrageous love poetry of «Europe’s first poet» to new life. Known for a directing style characterised by precise language and strong visuals, she hunts down the forgotten remains of Sappho’s poems, condenses them into a chorus and, on a tour through the literary canon together with the Munich techno live band SLATEC, she exposes the systematic erasure of the female voice, its silencing and the need for it to empower itself.

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.

Hamsun’s trilogy tells the story of a man who feels he has been overlooked by the elites that set the tone and cheated of social recognition. The philosopher Ivar Kareno evolves from a 30-year-old radical and anti-liberal writer on the fringes of poverty into a 40-year-old private tutor to the two sons of a businessman in a distant coastal region. Here Kareno sits brooding in his writing tower, while an infectious fever descends on people, arriving from the North, the businessman Otermann is driven mad by his wealth and a strange man wanders between the houses, rumoured to be justice. Ten years later, the 50-year-old Kareno is still hoping for a major turning point in his life. And he will indeed reach a milestone where he must decide whether he will remain true to the radical ideas of his youth or to pursue a career that is more measured politically.   

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.

With sharp-witted and pleasurable writing, Kevin Rittberger demonstrates why climate targets will never be achieved under the current economic regime, that work is self-defeating if it makes people ill and that the model of blood-based kinship is outmoded due to the current state of medicine and technology.

After fifteen years in exile, Orestes returns incognito to his home city of Argos – the same city in which his father Agamemnon was murdered by his wife Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus on his victorious return from Troy. However, desire for revenge is not the reason for his spontaneous homecoming – it is the rumour of a mysterious plague of flies. When his sister Electra persuades him to stay, it gradually dawns on him that Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are not only cruelly oppressing the people, they have also implicated him in Agamemnon’s murder. Only then does Orestes decide to take action.

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.

The text of «(Non)Mothers!» weaves together answers from 22 interviews on the subject of (non-)motherhood – into a play about decisions, doubts (still) births, terminations, transformations and actions of bravery.