Schedule

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.   

Ephraim Cabot has built his farm in New England up out of nothing, through hard work and the sweat of his brow and he keeps his three sons in line with Puritan discipline. However, instead of handing on the fruits of their collective toil to the next generation, he introduces the young Abbie to them as his bride, thereby unleashing a tragedy of ancient dimensions. While the elder brothers entirely abandon any hope of inheriting from their father and follow the call of gold to California, a fateful triangle develops between his youngest son   Eben, his father and his step-mother – and Abbie too raises a claim to the farm that Eben is willing to defend by any means.

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.

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.

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.

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.

In her adaptation, the director Elsa-Sophie Jach has seized on the idea Goethe abandoned and transfers Goethe’s love-sick alter ego to the stage. «WERTHER. A Theatrical Folly» supplements Goethe’s shimmering, astonishingly modern rush of emotion with texts by one of his contemporaries: Karoline von Günderrode.

It takes the physical pain of cancer to break through Fritz Zorn’s protective shell of a cultivated «insensitivity of the soul». It is not until he is in danger of dying that his resistance awakens against not being allowed to live: «I am young and rich and educated: and I am unhappy, neurotic and alone.» With these words the Swiss author Fritz Zorn opens his reckoning with this background, family and education. However: his contemplation of death is a contemplation of freedom. The art of dying liberates the individual from all subjugation and compulsion and by accepting one’s own finality it offers the possibility of seeing oneself as part of an overarching process of transformation.

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.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.

Ephraim Cabot has built his farm in New England up out of nothing, through hard work and the sweat of his brow and he keeps his three sons in line with Puritan discipline. However, instead of handing on the fruits of their collective toil to the next generation, he introduces the young Abbie to them as his bride, thereby unleashing a tragedy of ancient dimensions. While the elder brothers entirely abandon any hope of inheriting from their father and follow the call of gold to California, a fateful triangle develops between his youngest son   Eben, his father and his step-mother – and Abbie too raises a claim to the farm that Eben is willing to defend by any means.

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.

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.

In her autobiographical memoir «A Girl’s Story», published in 2016, the French writer Annie Ernaux attempts to understand a deeply formative experience in her own life. What happened to her, a young woman aged 18 at the time, in the summer of 1958? Between fragments of memories, diary entries, letters and decades-old photos, the author undertakes an almost forensic analysis of what happened, its effects and the social frameworks and sexual double standards that grant or refuse entirely different forms of «freedom» to men and women respectively. «A Girl’s Story» shows an almost 80-year-old woman painfully confronting sexual shame, impotence and self-empowerment and is – shortly before the #MeToo movement arose – a touching and highly political document of putting an end to silence.

The author and musician PeterLicht frees this moral portrait that we now find barely legible from the socio-political reality of French absolutism and sets his sights on the present in his new version «Tartuffe or the Philosopher’s Swine». Here he employs the same characters as the original, whose literary descendants are nevertheless given considerable licence: in secular times one abhors a vacuum and so the «socially interconnected sculpture» hopes for and fears the appearance of Tartuffe, who serves to supply their wishes and as a surface onto which they may project themselves.

Ensemble member Valentino Dalle Mura has been a Batman fan ever since he was a child. After devouring hundreds of comics and every film version he could find over the course of two decades, he now shares his expert knowledge with the audience while also questioning what kind of image of a man and a hero he has been worshipping.

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.   

Lola Montez was one of the most dazzling female figures in the history of Bavaria and the city of Munich. When Lola – who was actually born Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert – arrived in Munich in 1846, the immigration police recorded her as: «artist, dancer from Sevilla, Spain, 24 years old, Catholic, no passport.» A short time later she had become the lover of the Bavarian King Ludwig I. However, it would be too simple to reduce this fascinating woman to the scandals that were often no more than allegations against her: because in both her thinking and her actions she was centuries ahead of her time.

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.

Lola Montez was one of the most dazzling female figures in the history of Bavaria and the city of Munich. When Lola – who was actually born Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert – arrived in Munich in 1846, the immigration police recorded her as: «artist, dancer from Sevilla, Spain, 24 years old, Catholic, no passport.» A short time later she had become the lover of the Bavarian King Ludwig I. However, it would be too simple to reduce this fascinating woman to the scandals that were often no more than allegations against her: because in both her thinking and her actions she was centuries ahead of her time.

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.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.

In her adaptation, the director Elsa-Sophie Jach has seized on the idea Goethe abandoned and transfers Goethe’s love-sick alter ego to the stage. «WERTHER. A Theatrical Folly» supplements Goethe’s shimmering, astonishingly modern rush of emotion with texts by one of his contemporaries: Karoline von Günderrode.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

It takes the physical pain of cancer to break through Fritz Zorn’s protective shell of a cultivated «insensitivity of the soul». It is not until he is in danger of dying that his resistance awakens against not being allowed to live: «I am young and rich and educated: and I am unhappy, neurotic and alone.» With these words the Swiss author Fritz Zorn opens his reckoning with this background, family and education. However: his contemplation of death is a contemplation of freedom. The art of dying liberates the individual from all subjugation and compulsion and by accepting one’s own finality it offers the possibility of seeing oneself as part of an overarching process of transformation.

Nimble, entertaining and with a light touch, the celebrated author Roland Schimmelpfennig’s debut play for young audiences tells of a child who has to rely entirely on their own devices.

Nimble, entertaining and with a light touch, the celebrated author Roland Schimmelpfennig’s debut play for young audiences tells of a child who has to rely entirely on their own devices.

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.

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.

Nimble, entertaining and with a light touch, the celebrated author Roland Schimmelpfennig’s debut play for young audiences tells of a child who has to rely entirely on their own devices.

Nimble, entertaining and with a light touch, the celebrated author Roland Schimmelpfennig’s debut play for young audiences tells of a child who has to rely entirely on their own devices.

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.

Lola Montez was one of the most dazzling female figures in the history of Bavaria and the city of Munich. When Lola – who was actually born Elizabeth Rosanna Gilbert – arrived in Munich in 1846, the immigration police recorded her as: «artist, dancer from Sevilla, Spain, 24 years old, Catholic, no passport.» A short time later she had become the lover of the Bavarian King Ludwig I. However, it would be too simple to reduce this fascinating woman to the scandals that were often no more than allegations against her: because in both her thinking and her actions she was centuries ahead of her time.

Calderón’s play tells of how Basilio, King of Poland, is given a prophecy that Sigismund will rise up against him, so keeps him locked up like an animal in a tower. In Hofmannsthal’s new version, which is rediscovered for the stage here, the author departed radically from the Spanish original.

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.

In her autobiographical memoir «A Girl’s Story», published in 2016, the French writer Annie Ernaux attempts to understand a deeply formative experience in her own life. What happened to her, a young woman aged 18 at the time, in the summer of 1958? Between fragments of memories, diary entries, letters and decades-old photos, the author undertakes an almost forensic analysis of what happened, its effects and the social frameworks and sexual double standards that grant or refuse entirely different forms of «freedom» to men and women respectively. «A Girl’s Story» shows an almost 80-year-old woman painfully confronting sexual shame, impotence and self-empowerment and is – shortly before the #MeToo movement arose – a touching and highly political document of putting an end to silence.

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.

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.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.

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.

Calderón’s play tells of how Basilio, King of Poland, is given a prophecy that Sigismund will rise up against him, so keeps him locked up like an animal in a tower. In Hofmannsthal’s new version, which is rediscovered for the stage here, the author departed radically from the Spanish original.

Kroetz shows the lives of a couple of cemetery gardeners, Hilde and Otto, who are just as frustrated in bed as they are making wreaths for burials. Into this sad idyll steps Fritz, Hilde’s brother. He has been imprisoned for exhibitionism and has sadistic tendencies that he now attempts to quell with medication. He finds work, a bed and understanding with the two of them. Otto, who cannot find what he needs with his wife, is aroused by how his brother-in-law is different and tries to provoke him into recidivism.

In her adaptation, the director Elsa-Sophie Jach has seized on the idea Goethe abandoned and transfers Goethe’s love-sick alter ego to the stage. «WERTHER. A Theatrical Folly» supplements Goethe’s shimmering, astonishingly modern rush of emotion with texts by one of his contemporaries: Karoline von Günderrode.

Who am I and what am I allowed to be? And what role do attributions, political and social norms play in this? SZ journalist Meredith Haaf talks with politician Tessa Ganserer and American author Siri Hustvedt, among others, about a topic that some people push, others smile at or openly demonize, and the (re)formation of certainties and society.

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.

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

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.

Within the framework of WELT/BÜHNE, every year international authors are guests at the Residenztheater. This weekend they will all come together to Munich and into conversation with you. In staged readings we present the new plays by Natalia Blok (Ukraine), Asiimwe Deborah Kawe (Uganda), Birutė Kapustinskaitė (Lithuania) and Noa Lazar-Keinan (Israel), which were created during the past season. In addition, you will have you will have the opportunity to meet this year's fellows Deepika Arwind (India), Odile Gakire Katese (Rwanda) and Oleksandr Seredin (Ukraine). get to know each other.

Within the framework of WELT/BÜHNE, every year international authors are guests at the Residenztheater. This weekend they will all come together to Munich and into conversation with you. In staged readings we present the new plays by Natalia Blok (Ukraine), Asiimwe Deborah Kawe (Uganda), Birutė Kapustinskaitė (Lithuania) and Noa Lazar-Keinan (Israel), which were created during the past season. In addition, you will have you will have the opportunity to meet this year's fellows Deepika Arwind (India), Odile Gakire Katese (Rwanda) and Oleksandr Seredin (Ukraine). get to know each other.

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.

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.

Within the framework of WELT/BÜHNE, every year international authors are guests at the Residenztheater. This weekend they will all come together to Munich and into conversation with you. In staged readings we present the new plays by Natalia Blok (Ukraine), Asiimwe Deborah Kawe (Uganda), Birutė Kapustinskaitė (Lithuania) and Noa Lazar-Keinan (Israel), which were created during the past season. In addition, you will have you will have the opportunity to meet this year's fellows Deepika Arwind (India), Odile Gakire Katese (Rwanda) and Oleksandr Seredin (Ukraine). get to know each other.

Chekhov’s texts, first and foremost his youthful fragment «Platonov», form the starting point for a new evening of musical theatre by resident director Thom Luz. He has borrowed the title from a Russian film version of «Platonov» from 1977 and assembles a society that attempts to discern the melody of the joys and horrors of the future from the songs of a long-forgotten time.

Calderón’s play tells of how Basilio, King of Poland, is given a prophecy that Sigismund will rise up against him, so keeps him locked up like an animal in a tower. In Hofmannsthal’s new version, which is rediscovered for the stage here, the author departed radically from the Spanish original.