Liliane Amuat

Ulrich Rasche stages «Agamemnon» - the first part of Aeschylus' famous «Oresteia» - as a visually stunning cycle of revenge. With Rasche, language, music and acting become an overall experience, making the power and topicality of the ancient material all the more vivid.

«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.

During the global economic crisis of the 1920s, a young woman tries out self-realization and yet ends up in a restrictive marriage, confronted with misogyny and male bonding as well as the rise of National Socialism. Elsa-Sophie Jach adapts Marieluise Fleisser's only novel for the stage.

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.

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.

For Achen, a young woman from Uganda, the invitation to a seminar on women's health at Johns Hopkins University in the USA is a long-awaited opportunity for a fresh start. During the seminar, she meets Kat, a white American and highly committed intern in the institute's health program, who wants nothing more than to travel to Achen's home country and help out there. At the end of the seminar, Kat is supposed to take the Ugandan participant to the airport for her journey home, but Achen has disappeared. Years will pass before the two women's paths cross again - with serious consequences. In «The Promised Land», Asiimwe Deborah Kawe tells of the lives of two women, of their hopes, disappointments, inner and outer struggles, and shows the gulf that exists between people with and without passports.

No other play by Heinrich von Kleist inspires quite so many superlatives as «Käthchen of Heilbronn». It is not only the most successful, but also the most romantic, the most fairy tale-like and at the same time the most mysterious play that he wrote.