Thomas Reisinger

Robert Icke has congenially translated Arthur Schnitzler's play «Professor Bernhardi» into the present day. The doctor Ruth Wolff not only comes into conflict with her colleagues and the maxims of the Catholic Church, but also into a media shitstorm. The «Times» of London celebrated «The Doctor» as an «open-heart operation on our present day, which gets more complicated the deeper you cut».

«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.

Copenhagen’s working-class district of Vesterbro in the 1920s has little room for the talent and dreams of young Tove. She leaves school at the age of fourteen and is sent against her will to work as a maid and later as a clerical worker. However, she refuses to give up, publishes her early poems and stories and continues to seek her freedom as a writer. In the «Copenhagen Trilogy» Tove Ditlevsen uses her own biography to tell of an escape from a complicated everyday reality into storytelling, skilfully interweaving fiction and reality. Her first-person narrator, with whom she shares a name, delivers a humorous and laconic account of a personal life that is nevertheless political. 

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.

Intrigues, conspiracies, political intrigues - Schiller's tragedy depicts the power struggle between the English Queen Elizabeth I and the Scottish Queen Mary Stuart. But what if only chance decides between power and powerlessness? Then the roles could also be «swapped». For each performance, a draw is held to decide which of the two actresses will play the victor or the vanquished.

In Stephan Kimmig's production, the boundaries between Shakespeare's fairy world and the harsh reality of the big city become blurred. Fuelled by Puck's magic, a summer night unfolds in which soon no one knows where love ends and obsession begins.