2011/12 season

Theatre section

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Reiner Ernst Ohle | Theatre section

Just as science and religion are pillars of European civilisation, knowledge and belief are the foundations of human identity. Our existence is shaped by what we believe and what we know. The faith in which we are brought up and the knowledge we acquire determine the way we think and act. Since knowledge and belief can both arouse and dash hopes and expectations, they condition our behaviour – both as individuals and as members of society. As the German theatre director Frank Castorf once said in an interview, “I need miracles. In this fast-paced world of ours, rationality alone is untenable. Pure cynicism is destructive. Religion provides an anchor.”

The THEATRE programme examines the complex weave of knowledge and belief from many different angles and in a variety of social contexts. The Classical THEATRE series features the widely acclaimed dramatisation by the Münchner Kammerspiele of Joseph Roth’s Job, a 20th-century family saga based on the biblical figure in which the main character is subjected to a succession of monstrous challenges. In the dramatisation of Kleist’s novella The Earthquake in Chile – a work that has unfortunately become all too relevant in the light of the recent catastrophe in Japan – a priest interprets an earthquake as divine retribution for declining moral values, triggering an uproar in the course of which two lovers die. A verse from the New Testament – from the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians – provides the basis for Faith, Hope, and Charity, a drama of bitter irony by the Austro-Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth that was a huge success in Bremen.

In the Modern THEATRE series, we can marvel at the ability of confidence tricksters to feed off the knowledge and belief of their victims in The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, based on the novel of the same name by Thomas Mann. The Seafarer is a humorous play by that master of Irish ghost stories Conor McPherson, who knows how to keep his audience entertained while at the same time encouraging them to reflect on human guilt and their own particular demons. The theatre director Roberto Ciulli and his ensemble have transformed Woody Allen’s 1975 comedy God into a series of hilarious images that focus on the culture “industry” and superficial celebrity on the one hand and the search for meaning and truth on the other hand. In Halpern and Johnson by Lionel Goldstein, two men – played by Hans Teuscher and Friedrich-Wilhelm Junge – compare the images of the same woman that they have each stored in their mind over a lifetime and discover that the human memory is a highly subjective repository for facts about and opinions of people we know. In The Truth we see what happens when three masters of bluff and deception come together.

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Mad Blood, which features in the Contemporary THEATRE series, is our contribution to the current debate on Islam, and one that confounds all the carefully nurtured clichés. In it, a teacher tries to introduce a class of unruly pupils from migrant families to Friedrich Schiller and his idealistic views on theatre – at gunpoint. Faith is the central theme of Jan Neumann’sFoundations, which examines fundamental beliefs, including the void that looms when all essential questions remain unanswered. The ensemble of the Hope Theatre Nairobi, directed by Stephan Bruckmeier, will perform the European premiere of The Dream of Getting a Job, which tells the story of the young job-seeker Myk and his wife Mellisa in the urban jungle of Nairobi.

In our Studio series, we will hear the unmistakable voice of the actress Verena Buss as she delves into Dante’s Divine Comedy, and in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man, Friedrich-Wilhelm Junge has a fantasy which reveals to him that paradise is lost. Gerd Wameling, Imogen Kogge and Werner Rehm, all long-standing members of the legendary Berlin Schaubühne troupe, join the political scientist Ekkehard Krippendorff for a journey through Goethe’s collection of poems entitled West-Eastern Divan. Love in Dark Times tells the moving story of a love affair between a dance student at the Folkwang University in Essen and a young SS officer in bombed-out Cologne.

Our Readings in the Kulisse are devoted entirely to football, the world’s principal substitute for religion. We welcome Philipp Köster, editor-in-chief of 11 Freunde, a German football magazine known for its intelligent, investigative sports journalism; Manni Breuckmann, a sports reporter for the West German Broadcasting Corporation who enjoys cult status; the cabaret artist Ben Redelings; the political scientist Jonas Gabler, who has carried out extensive research into right-wing extremism in German football; and last but by no means least, one of the giants of German football – Reiner Calmund.

Jürgen Zielinski’s staging of It’s All Over! by Holger Schober, produced in cooperation with Bayer Arts & Culture, will be premiered in our series of events for young people. Performed by the Theater der Jungen Welt Leipzig, the play involves a charity football match and the shattering of illusions. Friedrich Hebbel’s bourgeois tragedy Maria Magdalena, written in 1844, is set in a period of economic and social upheaval. In this production, Alexander Brill has transferred the action to the present, with a migrant family as the protagonists. Fahrenheit 451 is about cultural criticism, the nightmare of civilisation and the tyranny of entertainment overkill. This production by Gil Mehmert will be performed by the prestigious Theater der Jugend Munich and accompanied by Bananafishbones, who have composed music tailored to each scene.

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