Schedule

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.

Every Saturday you have the opportunity to discover the world behind the scenes at the Residenztheater.

«What, in your innermost being, is right and what is wrong? What is a lie and what is the truth? What is honest and what is dishonest? And what sort of attitude should one have to this?», asked the film director Krzysztof Kieślowski and the lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz in 1983 when they began to develop the internationally-acclaimed cycle of films «Dekalog», whose ten episodes each examine one of the Biblical commandments in the light of the secular present. Within a social panorama they portray situations that are universal, yet deeply private and personal, ones «that are fictious but could occur in anyone’s life». 

A golden age and decades of peace appear to have come to an end with the death of the Danish king. His successor Claudius attempts to soothe these burgeoning conflicts with diplomacy, but Prince Hamlet, the dead king’s son, refuses to accept his uncle as heir to the throne and his mother’s new husband. While the people seems willing to let itself be convinced of the new ruler’s illegitimacy, Hamlet has no desire to take his place – and thus, perhaps unconsciously, sabotages the traditional concept of political order itself.

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.

It is centred on Argan, who not only imagines he is ill, he actually is: he is suffering from hypochondria. As a result, he cannot and will not relate to his social surroundings any differently than he does to his misfortune, which he circles in tyrannical self-reflection. With «The Imaginary Invalid», the Cologne-based writer and musician PeterLicht writes his fourth new version of Molière: in his customary playful language he dissects both the individual body and the body of society and breaks the final taboo of neoliberal self-optimisers – that of mortality.

The clinic run by the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice is like being in a madhouse. It all starts with a job interview, during which Dr. Prentice makes #MeToo-like approaches to the secretary Geraldine. They are then caught in flagrante by his wife, who is busy attempting to conceal an affair of her own. A breathless chase ensues in which six characters are hunting for the right clothes, the right excuses and the right sex, where a policeman is almost murdered and which all with Winston Churchill’s penis.

Every Saturday you have the opportunity to discover the world behind the scenes at the Residenztheater.

In her trilogy Judith Herzberg uses subtle humour and a delicate hand to portray a Jewish extended family from Amsterdam between the 1970s and the turn of the millennium. It is a chronicle of emotions and complex relationships. In a cycle that spans three generations there are marriages, children are conceived, couples separate, fall in love with someone new – and get married again. To outsiders, members of the family and their friends appear to lead the same everyday lives as their contemporaries and when they meet at weddings or funerals, they talk, dance, fall in love and argue. But, quite casually and suddenly, glimpses of wounded souls appear behind this cheerful façade.

A golden age and decades of peace appear to have come to an end with the death of the Danish king. His successor Claudius attempts to soothe these burgeoning conflicts with diplomacy, but Prince Hamlet, the dead king’s son, refuses to accept his uncle as heir to the throne and his mother’s new husband. While the people seems willing to let itself be convinced of the new ruler’s illegitimacy, Hamlet has no desire to take his place – and thus, perhaps unconsciously, sabotages the traditional concept of political order itself.

«Agnes Bernauer», first performed in the GDR in 1977, starts like a stop-motion fairy tale: after the death of her mother, Agnes is sent out to work by her bankrupt father. But she is unable to believe that she will find a profession that «gives her pleasure», and decides to marry money. Her rise in society happens quickly: Agnes becomes pregnant and takes Albrecht as a husband: a squeamish only child and mother’s boy who is pampered in the golden cage of the Werdenfels’ family business.

The Munich dramatist Frank Wedekind spent over twenty years working on what he called his monster tragedy which, due to harsh censorship, would never be performed in his home city during his lifetime. It was too indecent, too lewd. In Lulu, Wedekind created a snake, a creature «to tempt, to seduce» – and to murder. For her lovers, Lulu is like a screen onto which they can project their desires – whatever a man wants, he will find it in her. And it goes further: Lulu’s seductions drive an entire succession of her lovers in Munich and Paris to their deaths until she ultimately throws herself into death’s arms in the back streets of London.

The clinic run by the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice is like being in a madhouse. It all starts with a job interview, during which Dr. Prentice makes #MeToo-like approaches to the secretary Geraldine. They are then caught in flagrante by his wife, who is busy attempting to conceal an affair of her own. A breathless chase ensues in which six characters are hunting for the right clothes, the right excuses and the right sex, where a policeman is almost murdered and which all with Winston Churchill’s penis.

Rising sea levels, forests dying and even the two world wars were supposedly predicted by the woodland prophet Mühlhiasl, who apparently lived near Straubing during the 16^th century and went down in legends of the Bavarian forest as a local Nostradamus. The dramatist, filmmaker and poet Herbert Achternbusch makes use of this legend to write about a society that is determined to preserve prosperity by any means necessary: the entire village lives off the local manufacturers’ fame for making ruby glass – however the master glassmaker who just passed away took the recipe to the grave with him. The cowherd Hias, who is hastily summoned for help, confirms the clairvoyant faculties attributed to him by arriving before he has even been called for. Spurred on by his gloomy forecasts on one hand and the tyrannical glassworks owner Goldfinger on the other, the entire village ends up in turmoil and is soon prepared to sacrifice the peace of its soul for wealth.

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?

After «The Three Musketeers», who continue to gallop across the Residenztheater stage, the Italian director Antonio Latella and his co-writer and dramaturg Federico Bellini now tackle the second great classic about famous swordsmen.  They take Rostand’s play as the starting point for research into the nature of theatre and love, in which instead of the more than fifty characters presented in the original, only two performers stand on stage. The two men now have to tell the story without the object of their desires and have no muse to inspire their verses.

Every Saturday you have the opportunity to discover the world behind the scenes at the Residenztheater.

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.

When the novel «Six of Them» by the émigré author Alfred Neumann, then living in Los Angeles, was published in 1945, it generated considerable controversy in Germany. Based on an article from «Time Magazine» about the leafleting campaign and execution of the members of the White Rose, Neumann created a «freely imagined work» from the lives and actions of the resistance fighters. As he put it: «It’s not about the Scholls. It’s not even about the Möllers, who I invented and whose name, language and nationality are interchangeable. It is purely about presenting an eternal idea.»

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.

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.

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?

From 21 October to 7 November 2021 theatre projects will be presented throughout Germany under the label «Kein Schlussstrich!» (“Do not draw the line!”) concerning the National Socialist Underground (NSU) - because even ten years after it unmasked itself, the underlying reasons behind the NSU continue to remain unclear. The play «Judgements», which premiered on 10 April 2014 in the Marstall and which was the first play in a German-speaking country to tell the story from the perspective of the loved ones the murder victims left behind, will therefore be restaged by Christine Umpfenbach with a new cast in the form of a re-enactment and be continued up to the present day.

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.

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.

It is centred on Argan, who not only imagines he is ill, he actually is: he is suffering from hypochondria. As a result, he cannot and will not relate to his social surroundings any differently than he does to his misfortune, which he circles in tyrannical self-reflection. With «The Imaginary Invalid», the Cologne-based writer and musician PeterLicht writes his fourth new version of Molière: in his customary playful language he dissects both the individual body and the body of society and breaks the final taboo of neoliberal self-optimisers – that of mortality.

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?

The clinic run by the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice is like being in a madhouse. It all starts with a job interview, during which Dr. Prentice makes #MeToo-like approaches to the secretary Geraldine. They are then caught in flagrante by his wife, who is busy attempting to conceal an affair of her own. A breathless chase ensues in which six characters are hunting for the right clothes, the right excuses and the right sex, where a policeman is almost murdered and which all with Winston Churchill’s penis.

In her trilogy Judith Herzberg uses subtle humour and a delicate hand to portray a Jewish extended family from Amsterdam between the 1970s and the turn of the millennium. It is a chronicle of emotions and complex relationships. In a cycle that spans three generations there are marriages, children are conceived, couples separate, fall in love with someone new – and get married again. To outsiders, members of the family and their friends appear to lead the same everyday lives as their contemporaries and when they meet at weddings or funerals, they talk, dance, fall in love and argue. But, quite casually and suddenly, glimpses of wounded souls appear behind this cheerful façade.

After «The Three Musketeers», who continue to gallop across the Residenztheater stage, the Italian director Antonio Latella and his co-writer and dramaturg Federico Bellini now tackle the second great classic about famous swordsmen.  They take Rostand’s play as the starting point for research into the nature of theatre and love, in which instead of the more than fifty characters presented in the original, only two performers stand on stage. The two men now have to tell the story without the object of their desires and have no muse to inspire their verses.

«What, in your innermost being, is right and what is wrong? What is a lie and what is the truth? What is honest and what is dishonest? And what sort of attitude should one have to this?», asked the film director Krzysztof Kieślowski and the lawyer Krzysztof Piesiewicz in 1983 when they began to develop the internationally-acclaimed cycle of films «Dekalog», whose ten episodes each examine one of the Biblical commandments in the light of the secular present. Within a social panorama they portray situations that are universal, yet deeply private and personal, ones «that are fictious but could occur in anyone’s life». 

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.

The Munich dramatist Frank Wedekind spent over twenty years working on what he called his monster tragedy which, due to harsh censorship, would never be performed in his home city during his lifetime. It was too indecent, too lewd. In Lulu, Wedekind created a snake, a creature «to tempt, to seduce» – and to murder. For her lovers, Lulu is like a screen onto which they can project their desires – whatever a man wants, he will find it in her. And it goes further: Lulu’s seductions drive an entire succession of her lovers in Munich and Paris to their deaths until she ultimately throws herself into death’s arms in the back streets of London.

Rising sea levels, forests dying and even the two world wars were supposedly predicted by the woodland prophet Mühlhiasl, who apparently lived near Straubing during the 16^th century and went down in legends of the Bavarian forest as a local Nostradamus. The dramatist, filmmaker and poet Herbert Achternbusch makes use of this legend to write about a society that is determined to preserve prosperity by any means necessary: the entire village lives off the local manufacturers’ fame for making ruby glass – however the master glassmaker who just passed away took the recipe to the grave with him. The cowherd Hias, who is hastily summoned for help, confirms the clairvoyant faculties attributed to him by arriving before he has even been called for. Spurred on by his gloomy forecasts on one hand and the tyrannical glassworks owner Goldfinger on the other, the entire village ends up in turmoil and is soon prepared to sacrifice the peace of its soul for wealth.

In sharp, precise poetic miniatures and snapshots, Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of Germany’s best-known contemporary playwrights, describes casual encounters, incidental gestures and fragments of conversation across a panorama of characters that go together to establish a kaleidoscopic image of a society suddenly brought to a standstill by a pandemic. Through skilful leaps in time, abrupt disjunctions and cleverly constructed transitions we follow the broadest possible range of characters enter a disparate and dissonant period after this shock – of social isolation, helplessness, fear and desperation.

The clinic run by the psychiatrist Dr. Prentice is like being in a madhouse. It all starts with a job interview, during which Dr. Prentice makes #MeToo-like approaches to the secretary Geraldine. They are then caught in flagrante by his wife, who is busy attempting to conceal an affair of her own. A breathless chase ensues in which six characters are hunting for the right clothes, the right excuses and the right sex, where a policeman is almost murdered and which all with Winston Churchill’s penis.

Rising sea levels, forests dying and even the two world wars were supposedly predicted by the woodland prophet Mühlhiasl, who apparently lived near Straubing during the 16^th century and went down in legends of the Bavarian forest as a local Nostradamus. The dramatist, filmmaker and poet Herbert Achternbusch makes use of this legend to write about a society that is determined to preserve prosperity by any means necessary: the entire village lives off the local manufacturers’ fame for making ruby glass – however the master glassmaker who just passed away took the recipe to the grave with him. The cowherd Hias, who is hastily summoned for help, confirms the clairvoyant faculties attributed to him by arriving before he has even been called for. Spurred on by his gloomy forecasts on one hand and the tyrannical glassworks owner Goldfinger on the other, the entire village ends up in turmoil and is soon prepared to sacrifice the peace of its soul for wealth.