Robert Dölle

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?

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.   

«Yes - No», «Light - Dark», «There - Away», «Breakfast or not», «War or not» - author Nele Stuhler has collected lists of opposites that question the depths of everyday life as well as the very big world situation and put them into poem form. A poetic and highly comical concert of contradictions performed by three actors on an open stage.

The most frequently performed contemporary international playwright Yazmina Reza, acclaimed for her plays’ witty dialogue, wrote «Anne-Marie the Beauty» as a full-length monologue for her favourite actor André Marcon. This elogy for the art of acting centres on an ageing actress who has spent her entire life in the theatre playing small and minor roles and has never been able to progress beyond this obscure existence.

«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.

You are how you speak. Professor of Phonetics Higgins makes a bet with his friend Pickering that he can turn the energetic Eliza Doolittle, who sells flowers in the street to make ends meet and speaks the broadest dialect, into an upper-class lady with immaculate articulation. Eliza proves to be a disciplined and talented pupil who manages to pass the test of entering high society. Higgins attributes this success to his own genius and automatically lays claim to her. He fails to notice that his teaching has helped Eliza to become a self-aware and thoughtful woman who is not only capable of making her own decisions but of acting on them too.