Michael Wächter

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?

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.

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.

«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.

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.

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.