Almut Wagner

Claire Fletcher, the priest of a small town, becomes the witness and victim of an act that defies comprehension. During a rehearsal of the community choir she conducts, a young man kills several choir members. Since this happened, nothing is as it was and a return to normality seems impossible.

In each performance the characters appear on stage with a different choir from the Munich area.

Disappearing, fading away, vanishing and escaping – Aristophanes’s comedies deal with everything in the world that is ephemeral: life, happiness, property, knowledge and trust. They tell us about the complicated business of being human, about the problem of the just distribution of wealth, about greed, twisted rhetoric, and the eternal incompatibility between theory and practice.

One stormy night in 1836, Hans Christian Andersen arrives uninvited at the home of his childhood friend Edvard Collin, who is to marry his fiancée Henriette the next day. Andersen has travelled through the wind and the rain to once again confess his love for Edvard. The family provide a frosty reception and the groom himself is out celebrating his last night as a bachelor. Only Henriette feels attracted to the unconventional charm of their guest, who lives in a fantasy world continually surrounded by characters from his own fairy tales. He magically transforms a sober room into a sparkling underwater landscape and castles of otherworldly beauty. And he starts telling his friend’s fiancée the fairy tale of The Little Mermaid: burning with love for a Prince, she wishes to become human and is willing to sacrifice her voice and her home to do so – risking her life.

For the city of Munich, the 1972 Olympic Games are a giant step towards the future. How the Cold War was reflected in the «cheerful games» of 1972, why violence in the form of international terrorism came to the Olympic village despite all efforts to the contrary, and what consequences this continues to have today are investigated by the directing team of Regine Dura and Hans-Werner Kroesinger using eyewitness accounts, investigation files, newspaper articles and interviews with people who were there and saw what happened.

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.

On the basis of interviews that the journalist and writer Jürgen Berger conducted with trans* people in Thailand and Germany between 2017 and 2022, the production explores the gap in society which these people inhabit in both countries.

Yasmina Reza, the celebrated author of hit social comedies such as «The God of Carnage» and «Life x 3» and bestselling novels – most recently «Serge» – has written a new play that incisively dramatises the profound problems of understanding that increasingly dominate relations between generations.

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?

At Whitsun the lion king Nobel invites his subjects to his court for an early summer celebration. The entire animal kingdom gathers – ranging from the crane to the wolf and the bear. Only one animal is missing: the fox called Reineke. As soon as his name his mentioned, the mood of harmony vanishes. One angry accusation follows another and Reinike the fox is charged in his absence with a series of incredible crimes. The cockerel, for example, complains of losing his wife and children – Reineke ate them for supper. When he is eventually put on trial, the accomplished liar – an animal equivalent of Ibsen’s Peer Gynt – manages to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes – man, woman or creature – and slip his neck out of the noose. Eventually he even acquires a whole crowd of followers and is elected Chancellor.

The moral of the story is that not everyone with foxy cunning and a talent for oratory puts those gifts to benevolent use – on the contrary! But how can we tell the difference between truth and lies? How can we avoid being taken in by the peddlers of fake news? How can we remain faithful to our own opinions and values?

Auftakt mit Autor*innen und Theatermacher*innen aus Indien, Ruanda und der Ukraine  

In Gesprächen, Lesungen und spielerischen Formaten heißen wir die Autor*innen der Plattform für internationale zeitgenössische Dramatik am Residenztheater willkommen. Lernen Sie die vielseitigen Künstler*innen Odile Gakire Katese aus Ruanda, Oleksandr Seredin aus der Ukraine und Deepika Awind aus Indien persönlich kennen und erhalten Sie Einblicke in ihr künstlerisches Schaffen.