Michael Wächter

Geboren 1986 in Leipzig, studierte Michael Wächter an der Roosevelt High School of the Performing Arts in Kalifornien und an der Hochschule für Schauspielkunst «Ernst Busch» Berlin. Von 2010 bis 2015 war er Ensemblemitglied am Deutschen Nationaltheater Weimar und leitete dort u. a. seine Late-Night-Show «Wächters Freunde». Danach wechselte Michael Wächter in das Ensemble des Theaters Basel, wo er wiederholt mit Simon Stone, Antonio Latella, Miloš Lolić und Nora Schlocker zusammenarbeitete. Beim Berliner Theatertreffen 2017 wurde er mit dem Alfred-Kerr-Darstellerpreis für seine herausragende Leistung in Simon Stones Inszenierung «Drei Schwestern» ausgezeichnet. Im selben Jahr wählte ihn die Kritikerumfrage der Zeitschrift «theater heute» zum Nachwuchsschauspieler des Jahres. 2019 folgte er Andreas Beck ans Residenztheater.

Performing in

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.

Die drei Musketiere (The three musketeers)

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.

Drei Schwestern (Three sisters)

PART I: MILLENNIUM APPROACHES

PART II: PERESTROIKA

The mid-1980s: the outbreak of the disease AIDS alarms New York. Louis, son of a wealthy Jewish family, abandons his sick boyfriend Prior and starts a relationship with conservative Mormon lawyer Joe. When Joe’s drug-dependent wife Harper retreats into dreams of everlasting ice, his strictly religious mother flies in outraged from Salt Lake City. The Republican Roy Cohn, a cynical and power-obsessed lawyer, insists until his last breath that he is not gay and does not have AIDS. Even on his deathbed, he refuses to stop arguing about this with his black nurse Belize. And then an angel breaks through Prior’s bedroom ceiling.

Engel in Amerika (Angels in America)

Elisabeth Gärtner, a retired architect, has only one more wish: she wants to die. Her beloved husband died of cancer three years ago and without him life has no meaning for her any more. A drug that would allow her to die of her own volition has been refused her. Now the Ethics Council must make a decision on her case. Expert witnesses from the fields of law, medicine and theology argue over the question:  Does a human being have a right to determine their own death? Are doctors allowed to help someone commit suicide? And who do our lives actually belong to? To us? To the state? Or to God?

Gott (God)
Residenztheater, 18.30 o'clock
Sun 15 Oct

A caretaker is murdered with no reason or motive. Alienated from himself and life in general by a working day that is always the same, a bank clerk seizes an axe and commits murder. This action lacking any obvious cause shocks state prosecutor Martin, who is in charge of the case. In the murder and his crime he can see a reflection of his own imprisonment in a bourgeois existence dominated by duty, law and order. The prosecutor is immediately struck by an existential fear that drives him to escape into the fairy tale world of a mysterious alter ego: the world of Count Öderland.

Graf Öderland (Count Öderland)

Medea is the most startling character in the history of literature. Like no other female figure, she leaves an unprecedented trail of blood behind her: betraying her father, murdering her brother, murdering the King of Iolcus – and that is not enough.

Medea
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Thu 26 Oct
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Fri 27 Oct

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.

Unsere Zeit (Our Time)

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.

Woyzeck

«And often the outward signs of ascent only become apparent once the decline has begun again.» In his 1901 novel, subtitled «The Decline of a Family», Thomas Mann uses precise characterisation and an ironic style to describe the incipient structural collapse of the grande bourgeoisie. Mann drew his inspiration for «Buddenbrooks» from the story of his own family in Lübeck and people of the city where he was living at the time: Munich. Mann shows the potential complexity of relations between North and South Germany with considerable humour in the relationship between Tony Buddenbrook and the Munich hop-trader Alois Permaneder.

Buddenbrooks
Premiere
Cuvilliéstheater
Thu 23 Nov
Cuvilliéstheater, 19.30 o'clock
Sat 25 Nov
Cuvilliéstheater, 19.30 o'clock
Tue 28 Nov

«Once the social order has been consolidated, anyone who is not alarmed by reality is as free as they wish,» Jean Jourdheuil wrote about Labiche’s work. But in this play, that alarm is felt: Lenglumé begins to realise what he might be capable of and as a result – at least for a day – his self-assurance and satisfaction crumble.

Die Affäre Rue de Lourcine (THE AFFAIR IN THE RUE DE LOURCINE)

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.

Die Nacht kurz vor den Wäldern (THE NIGHT JUST BEFORE THE FORESTS)
19.00 o'clock
Thu 19 Oct
19.00 o'clock
Wed 25 Oct

With «Success», we journey into the inner workings of a society in which everything is measured in terms of personal career advantage, the demands of embittered contemporaries, hatred of one’s neighbours, anger at those with a different political opinion and one’s own lack of any sense of direction.

Erfolg (SUCCESS)
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Tue 24 Oct
Residenztheater, 18.30 o'clock
Sun 29 Oct
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Thu 02 Nov
Residenztheater, 19.30 o'clock
Mon 27 Nov

Ensemble