Der kleine Wolperdinger

“Sparta: a bureaucratically organised city-state, that temporarily wins hegemony in ancient Greece through a strong military. One of the archetypes of contemporary democracies. The people of Sparta are split in half: in their existence, in their nature. The gods have cut their own image into two: a punishment for the impiety of the people. Before, the people had four eyes, four legs and four arms, two faces and two sexes; they were rounded and complete. Now, there are only half-people. But was it really the gods who made the cut? ‘Where does he, who cuts, live? In Sparta? Or is that only his name? Sparta, yes, he could be called Sparta.’ Kalliope, a blind woman, asks this. With her and her six fellow sufferers, the cut failed. Mute, deaf, one-legged, dented, incurably sick and insane, they were abandoned in the wilderness of the Taygetos mountains immediately after birth. Taygetos, a healthy half-person, ostracised by the Spartans because of his humanity and empathy, saves this group of lost people and takes care of them.
This is where, years later, the story of the cicadas and their breeder starts. The outcasts want to go back to the people. They chased their saviour and breeder Taygetos away and are constantly planning their march to Sparta. They train in the Spartan virtues and become more and more human, sometimes in surprising ways. When they finally set out, these undead ones meet a Spartan patrol. The showdown begins.” (Martin Schall)

The Kneißl family leads a poor, austere life. They go hungry quite often. Only by breaking the law can they feed their seven children. Raised like this, Mathias, born in 1875, learns from an early age to fend for himself, to poach, to shoot. When he and his brother, Alois, are supposed to be arrested for skipping school, Alois resists and shoots the constable. For this, he, a fifteen-year-old boy, is sentenced to fifteen years of jail. Mathias is also jailed for alleged involvement. When Mathias leaves jail after nearly six years, he is dreaming of a ‘normal’ life. But as much as he tries, his reputation precedes him. Because of this, he doesn’t have a choice: he has to poach again, steal again, and finally even shoot and kill. Soon, his image is printed in the newspapers, wanted posters are being put up and the police start the famous ‘Kneißlhunt’. Mathias plays cat and mouse with the constables, escapes again and again and ridicules the authorities. He has an easy job, especially because the people are on his side. They support him, give him food, hide him, because this Kneißl is one of them. Thus, Mathias slowly becomes what he never wanted to be: a hero of the people.
He is 27 years young when he is sent to the block in 1902. His lover Mathilde has betrayed him for the bounty. The newspapers report this on the front page, and 3,000 people gather before the gates of the execution square to cheer on their Kneißl one last time.

It’s a popular theatre classic: death, in the guise of frail Boandlkramer, comes to the small mountain hut of Brandner Kaspar. He wants to fetch him. Instead, he descends into debauchery, drinking and card games and soon owes the shrewd hermit eighteen more years of life. Heaven is in turmoil. Nevertheless, Boandlkramer manages to at least tentatively haul Brandner to paradise, where he eventually agrees to stay.
Wolfgang Maria Bauer’s play begins seven years later.
“All day paradise, every day – no one can bear that!” One night, Brandner Kaspar is looking down on Bavaria through the heavenly telescope again. He sees his home, his great-grandchildren, his granddaughter Marei and her husband Flori. Suddenly he gains knowledge of a planned theft, an imminent disaster. Brandner Kaspar is desperate: he must prevent this! He has to go back to Earth, immediately! But the only way to achieve this is Boandlkramer and his black carriage. The two of them set out to avert the impending doom. Unfortunately, things don’t go at all to plan. And the two of them mostly succeed in one thing: increasing confusion, on Earth as in heaven.

It is midsummer night, the time of dissolution of boundaries, day and night are not separated anymore, but coalesce in a diffuse twilight; a dream, a game, an exceptional situation.
A day/night to finally act and flee: Christin bases her plans on physical studies, she wants the universal escape, together with Jean. A day/night to flinch from the possible again: Jean embroils Christin in a game that doesn’t consist of a tangible act, but of imagination and vivid fancy.
Speaking and listening, lock, stock and barrel. Something strange, a third party emerges from the well: a hybrid being, condensate of their imagination.
The troll is called Julie, like the desirable, untouchable daughter of the count, whose servants are Christin and Jean. The embodied, carnal imagination demolishes borders. Christin withdraws from the game by jumping, defying gravity and letting earth speed past her. The two who were left behind fasten onto each other until estrangement. Devotion, the confession of an impossible love, becomes withdrawal, becomes a radical questioning of love and capacity for love. The troll casually slits his own throat, he erases all traces and disappears with the first light of day. In his place, not even noticed by Jean, Christin is laying there; she’s left behind like coffee grounds, like half-empty glasses after a jamboree. Meanwhile, the troll, the projection, confidently disappears in the rising morning sun.

Darkness and silence, the flipside of the theatre, prevail for a long time. Slowly, timidly, shadowy contours become apparent. Focusing and pausing seems impossible. The characters are careful to stay blurry. Names, places, stories can’t find a solid ground, and every attempt to capture them fails. And still, this is where new terrain originates: no man’s land, black grass. A cleared field. An old border strip? Maybe a minefield? Anyhow, the border has been removed.
Nanou, a young woman, is sitting there. She is bound. She is waiting, wearing all her clothes on top of one another. She wants to flee.
A stranger approaches, an oddly hunched figure: Färber. He describes the place from his memory, it’s the place of his own past. He lets himself get caught on purpose, he wants to perish like this. And for that he uses the third character of the play: Jeep. Färber lets himself die. Jeep helps him involuntarily, not knowing that the old man is his father.
Already, a red signal flare is illuminating the sky: Nanou is gone.

The summer tourists are coming to the country! They are actually welcome guests as they bring a supplementary income to the farmers, even though “the starving city folk eat up the lard pot and the flour and the egg supplies”. Apart from that, it’s the encounter of the rural way of life with the class snobbery of elegant society – an explosive mix. The townswoman Rosalie is very different, though. She loves the simple and authentic country life. Even though she is promised in marriage to a wealthy man in the city, she falls in love with the farmer’s son. But she has made her plans without taking the farmer’s wife into account who most definitely wants a different woman for her son than a madam from the city.

A play that can only last two times 45 minutes.
Nothing is being examined critically, football is being played.
Real football.
On stage. Two teams, small goals. Contest. That also means the theatre has to have half-decent footballers in its company.
The play tells the story of a family from the perspective of a U13 footballer, but at the heart of it is the thespian aspects of football.
Thus, the texts of this play are explicitly only breathers, the celebration belongs to football. (Wolfgang Maria Bauer)

“The setting: a cemetery. A gravestone made from green travertine marks the grave of a man. It is September. The characters: the widow and a stranger. For a few days now she has been watching him watching her. He gives her the creeps, and exudes violence and a secret that she feels is connected to her. She has to talk to him, has to know, has to be sure. Her first approach is almost involuntary and leads her, as if sleepwalking, along the trail of their relationship: the stranger crafted the tombstone of her husband. It shows an inverted figure, the man, “hidden in himself”. The reply of the man is outrageous: “I’ve come to destroy you”. Abruptly, this seemingly private story has become one of violence. Suddenly, the stranger could be an assassin, the woman his victim. Suddenly, they are both representatives of their cultures, two worlds fighting for their identity. In the struggle of the individuum, the mechanisms of exploitation, guilt and revenge that move world affairs today become clear. This makes Late Rage a pointed analysis of the stubbornness of all human truths, a mind game about the question of the origin of terrorism and governmental violence.
Late Rage is a whodunnit and a discourse about the (im)possibility of understanding.”

God be with you, land of Bavaria.
Bavarian cosiness is not just about beer and pretzels, Oktoberfest and lederhosen, but also songs, Schnaderhüpfl and Gstanzl. Most of them are about the joys of life and love, marital strife, or simply satisfy the desire to poke fun. Wolfgang Maria Bauer has compiled a selection of Bavarian folk songs for a theatre evening and also tells a really hearty story. He presents Bavarian songs as if in a sonata – a very special evening that is sure to thrill the audience. (Announcement by the Landestheater Niederbayern)

“If I think about my play, I see an abandoned seaside resort in the last light of day. An old man with a gaunt face is standing on top of the cliffs: Pinon. He has lived alone on the cliffs, in a house that he built into a prison, for eighteen years. He doesn’t speak, but he helps, if someone comes to the cliffs who really wants to jump. And I hear the faint music from the ‘Dance Palace’, I see Gratia, serving the few guests for eighteen years in her way, but I also see the ugly scars on her face. And I smell the mouldy wallpaper in the ‘flop house’, smell the unwashed clothes of the doorman, smell his foul breath. And I hear Sebastian, hear him talk into the darkness on the bench at the waterside promenade, hear his wish for a story. And I see Daniel, see that he wants to pay because someone listened to him, maybe for the first time in eighteen years. And I see Vera walk through the night, see her in front of the billboard with the long-expired event suggestions, and I hear her memorize the posters. They all share a story: the play. I neither can nor want to retell it, that is the task of the characters, and my characters never talk about themselves, but only about who they randomly meet in this night. They only look at themselves with the eyes of a stranger and then find a story in the happenings, which means they are making each other up, each gives the other one a story – his own.” (Wolfgang Maria Bauer)

After a large fire that destroyed their farm and the death of the demented father, the son and daughter, their mother and the refugee Abdul are left with nothing. But they have a new idea for a new beginning: With the help of Abdul's knowledge, they want to take the refugee route in order to turn it into a special kind of adventure tourism. From Munich, the route is always upstream, and they encounter all kinds of characters: On the train through Serbia the mother thinks back to an old lover, off the coast of Greece they are taken in by an "escape helper" who has not yet caught anybody on the way to Syria in his net. And having just arrived in Syria, a lot of money is offered for the daughter's body. Before you know it, their tracks are lost in the sand, and the illusory happiness of the tourists turns out to be nothing more than a mirage.