Juliane Köhler

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.

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 death of his wife, Richard lives in seclusion in a gated community. He wants his only daughter Helen to look after him, as he is increasingly in need of care. There has been a long period of silence between father and daughter, but there is more that separates them than unites them. Richard respects neither Helen's idealistic view of her profession as a lawyer nor the choice of her husband, a black intellectual. Helen, in turn, accuses him of evading the challenges of a changing society. «How should we live together?» asks the most-performed Dutch playwright Lot Vekemans in her new play, striking a chord with the times. In the German-language premiere, Juliane Köhler plays alongside Manfred Zapatka.

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.

Imagine that you haven’t been born yet. And imagine too that your whole life so far is unimportant. Just like all the opportunities you might have missed or bad decisions you might have made. Leave it all behind you. In «Now or Never» we are going to make a completely fresh start!