Die Wolken, die Vögel, der Reichtum (The clouds, the birds, wealth)

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. They are populated by the honest poor and poor honest people, creditors in debt, wayward sons and daughters who beat their fathers (and vice versa), blind gods, baffled oracles, highly paid lawyers for good and bad causes, and the goddess of poverty who is hounded out of the city in disgrace. They are set on the fringes of the city, in offices, courtrooms and in a city where the birds have taken control. In the midst of this is humanity, for whom everything is happening too fast and who would like to sit down.

«You can see: the world hardly seems to have changed in the last 2,400 years. Our life is like a hastily-told muddled joke and ultimately the only real winners of our wars and conflicts are the clouds in the sky – and ever since Socrates we know that they do not actually care about our human dramas and that is why since the beginning of time they do what they do best: drift by. The only consolation is that Socrates’s bowl of hemlock is really a horn of plenty: there’s enough poison for everyone.» Thom Luz

Thom Luz, Resident Director at the Residenztheater, a proven cloud expert and specialist in shimmering, fleeting and multi-layered productions, will develop a new evening of musical theatre from three plays by Aristophanes. Its themes are greed, parsimony and singing.