Gemetzel

The beautiful Emma Bovary is bored with her country life and her marriage to the doctor Charles. With the realization that life has more to offer elsewhere, a lust for life awakens which neither a secret affair with the landowner Rodolphe nor a passionate liaison with the young Léon can quiet.
The dramatisation is based on the critically acclaimed new translation by Elisabeth Edl.

In August of 1932, the anti-Semitic weekly newspaper "Der Stürmer" bore the headline: "The first football club in Nuremberg is destroyed by a Jew." This Jew, who allegedly led to the destruction of the club, was the Hungarian coach Jenö Konrad. Only two defeats proved the undoing of the highly successful club coach. Because of these failures, the German football championship was lost, and a manhunt began. And because Jenö Konrad thankfully recognized the menacing situation, he left Germany with his wife and daughter in the same month. After a long odyssey across Europe, he was able to build up a new existence. However, he never worked again as a trainer. The author Albert Ostermaier embarks on a fictional journey into the thoughts and feelings of Jenö Konrad and rewrites a piece of Nuremberg football history.

At the end of the seventies, Serge Gainsbourg invented a second face for himself, a double: Gainsbarre – a chain smoker, drunkard, seducer, provocateur, daredevil. A man hidden by the smoke of his cigarettes and the fog of his drinks, a man like his music, impulsive, driven, wild, and at the same time frantically tender, a man who sang every line and kissed every kiss as if they were his last, before death suffocated everything.

Gainsbarre, the attempt to invent an ego that can do everything, who is allowed everything, has to do everything, survives everything that would destroy his true self. An alter ego like a dazzling, loud, protective skin, to save the silence beneath. As if a person could see himself in a mirror and paint over his face, and then walk away and become two people.

Moi non Plus is a roadmovie and a love story about a man and his struggle with himself, with addiction, with failure. A struggle which increasingly defeats Gainsbarre - public, imagined, feverish fiction, not Gainsbourg. Only in the end, before death, does the child appear again, with unexpected happiness and love - a happy ending, when he finally achieves what he wanted to achieve. When it is still Moi non plus, but now more than ever: Je t'aime. (Albert Ostermaier)

Bassanio loves Portia. This is expensive, because Portia has a large inheritance and the suitors are queuing for her hand. He needs cash quickly, and Antonio, his best friend, has enough of it for the two of them. But Antonio can’t get to his money so quickly, because all his capital is tied up in all the markets of this world. But why can’t he make a short-term loan? After the close of the stock exchange, Antonio will be more than in the black again. In the meantime, there is Shylock, and Shylock can come up with cash quickly. This is his business, even if one makes fun of him for it on the Rialto. The stakes are high: Shylock will cut a full pound of meat out of his body if Antonio cannot repay his debt. But Antonio loves Bassanio, and he who loves is willing to risk not only his heart. Highly speculative, without scruples, without collateral – the young traders of Venice make such deals daily. The only God whom they serve is money. And with money comes salvation. Until the prices fall, the markets collapse, and the insane dealings in love and money get completely out of hand.

For far too long, the war in Afghanistan has robbed Phaedra of her husband, and delusion and desire have turned her into a hopeless addict. Phaedra drinks. Phaedra cries for Theseus. Phaedra rages. Hippolytus, the refugee, whom Theseus entrusts to her as messenger, son, and wounded soul, will have to be conquered by the woman who is ill with love and without regard for the fact that the son does not desire her, but rather her daughter Aricia. But love has no chance in this lost world, in which a xenophobic mob pursues everything that is different. Thus Theseus, after his return from the war, finds the same thing at home as he found at the front: hatred, violence, and death. (Announcement Residenztheater München)

Three norns, three goddesses of fate weave the threads of life. They weave and knot, stretch and spin, weave and work. And in doing so, they separate and join as they please. Past, present and future are the fabrics from which they knit their narrative. And a new world. A world that flows from their hands. An ideal world seems possible. Or even hell. After all, are the three Norns pulling the same strings? Or are they entangling themselves and fate in their conflicting desires? Albert Ostermaier has three Norns tell the story of the Twilight of the Gods with virtuosity. And about "How it will be", when a new world can be utopia or dystopia. how it will be how that becomes how how in the end never becomes "After the Norns" was written as a libretto for the Modern String Quartet and the Voyager Quartet for an opera without vocals.

Willy Zielke is a young, aspiring director and pioneering photographer in the 1920s. After his first film "Stahltier - The Steel Animal", he is recruited and used by Leni Riefenstahl and the Nazi regime for their Olympic films. Riefenstahl makes his art her own. When he becomes too dangerous to her career, she has him locked away in a psychiatric ward, where he is diagnosed as schizophrenic and forcibly sterilized. Five years later, she takes him back from the asylum because she needs him for her film "Tiefland". Later she will testify not to have been involved in Zielke's incarceration, and even more: not to have known about the later murder of the people she took out of the camps as extras for her film.
Willy Zielke wants to cut Leni Riefenstahl out of himself. She is the woman who has consumed him, who has sucked him dry and made his art her own. In an exorcism ritual, he once again conjures up the images that show how Riefenstahl, together with Goebbels, forged her perfidious plan.
In the screening room at the Reich Propaganda Ministry, Leni Riefenstahl and Josef Goebbels watch "The Steel Animal," Zielke's dark, expressionist-avant-garde masterpiece that Goebbels actually banned. As the film plays, the real scene unfolds between the two, evil in close-up, a close look at the mechanisms of power.
In sometimes nightmarish sequences, Schnitt takes us from Goebbels' home theater to the film set and into the bloody operating room, making us witness Zielke's inner recapitulation of the cruel story surrounding the destruction of his body and his work.

It's hot in jail. Kulterer still sits in his cell, but soon he is to be released. It is his last meeting with the hospital psychologist. Mrs. Dr. Dr., who played theater with him and the other prisoners. Midsummer Night’s Dream. Kulterer played Bottom. And the ass. He is an Austrian ass, after all. One who is afraid of freedom. For freedom is like death to him; it will stifle him, take away the air he needs to breathe. Just like the heat here, where Mrs. Dr. Dr. has stolen away the air. She lies there quite lifelessly, while Kulterer speaks to her. About Austria, about Shakespeare, and about the terrible darkness into which he writes his own darkness night by night. He speaks more freely to her than ever before. But he does not want to be free, for the world is full of people. Only an ass would forget that.

With Kultuerer, Albert Ostermaier brings back a Thomas Bernhard figure for the stage. In his second adaptation of Bernhard, he takes up Bernhard's motifs, skillfully combining them with characters from Shakespeare's Midsummer Night’s Dream, and adding his own unmistakable sound.

An empty public house: ‘The Everyman’. Heavy, dark wooden tables. Some tables have chairs on them, some don’t. In the middle of the pub, the publican is sitting alone at his regular table in his Sunday best. There's not a guest in sight, not a sound, only the publican is speaking. As if for his life. Swearing. About impudent guests. About impatient customers who can’t wait for a table and just sitting down without asking. The dumb ones that ask for lactose-free milk in their coffee but then gobble down an extra-large slice of cheese strudel. About the philistines, the freeloaders and the skinflints. He really doesn’t ask much of his guests. “Say hello, order, pay, say thank you and goodbye!” Instead of this he gets rude behaviour, impertinent special requests and stingy tips. And there’s barely a guest that still appreciates the great art of cookery on display at ‘The Everyman.’ They are indifferent to the love with which the calf’s brain is roasted and have no idea bout the sweetness that a Salzburger dumpling just has to have. A publican can do naught but despair, despair of the public house and of the world, of life and death.
“The pub is my world. Even if I’ve always said that the guests are the end of the world! So are we! Each one of us is the end of the world and chooses his publican and his pub.”
Albert Ostermaier’s publican has read Hofmannsthal and Handtke and berates his guests in the most beautiful tradition of Thomas Bernhard. An unfathomable monologue, furious and comic, straight out of the dark heart of the pub ‘The Everyman’.

Spotlights cut through the night. They are filming in front of the illuminated Wormser Dom. The successful film producer Konstantin Trauer wants to fulfill his life dream and film the Nibelung story. Up unto this point, he has failed with his ambitious project, but now he wants to prove to everybody that he will make his mark in the history of film. What he kept secret from everyone is that there is not much time left: a deadly disease rages inside him, and his production company is nearing bankruptcy. This final night of filming is Trauer’s last chance. For the realization of his idea, he couldn’t have picked anyone better than the eccentric directing star Arsenij Kubik, who pushes all the limits of sanity.

The mood is explosive, everyone plots against everyone else, everyone has something to hide and something to lose. Love, revenge, violence, death and passion: The Nibelungenlied becomes the secret script of this night. Even reality does not stop the film team: refugees reach the city, the park, the stage. And the drama in front of the cathedral does not only escalate in the battle of the queens.

GOLD talks about making films and going out of control. It is narrated by a film team who loves and hates, tears and kisses, while everything is hopelessly driven on to an explosive finale. We see the absurd theater which is created during filming, and the wild interaction between theater and film, Nibelungen and Noir. It is a camera journey into the abysses of the soul and its fears, a relentless close-up shot of our society.

A train, in the middle of the Orient on its way through the desert to the Persian oil fields of the British. In a special wagon: the travelling circus 'Notung': artists, fire-eaters, singers, musicians, clairvoyants, heartbreakers, wrapped in caftans. They play the story of the Nibelungen and travel as its heroes, Siegfried, King Gunther, Hagen or Brünhild. A juggler troupe, one thinks at first, but hidden under suitcases full of costumes, the whole train is full of weapons and explosives. For these Nibelungen heroes are disguised German officers, agents in 1915, in the middle of the First World War. Under the leadership of Captain Klein they are charged with the task of blowing up British oil wells in Persia, inciting Persian tribes to revolt and weakening the Empire considerably. Klein's Nibelungen Circus must perform surrounded by enemies. If the cover falls, their lives fall too.

Glut is based on a historical event. The author skilfully weaves the tale of the Nibelungen with an almost unknown chapter of German history. The train journey is an Orient Express journey of the craziest kind: full of anarchy, wit, political intrigue and false bottoms. For just as Captain Klein and his false heroes travel through the Orient in a grotesque travesty on a secret mission with an open outcome, the real Nibelungen were on their way from Burgundy to the court of King Etzel, where in the Nibelungenlied not only the common table awaits them at the end, but also their downfall. (Announcement Nibelungenfestspiele)

It's raining. Unceasingly. There is only one table in the forestry inn. Hadesser sits there, a writer, in front of him a collection of notes and, of course, a beer. Across from him sits the carriage driver, drinking beer stoically. Between the two a card game: Watten. The driver wants to play the game with the weary poet. Maybe for the last time. All his other fellow players have been lost, and last of all the doctor, in whose barracks Hadesser now resides, and whose collection of notes he sees as a legacy. But Hadesser does not want to play with him, he only wants to play and rant in his own head. Against politics, against literature, against Austria as well as against Bavaria, against the insensibility of society, and not least against the "disastrous weather, in which even the healthiest become sick". But as much as Hadesser defends himself against playing Watten, the last round is yet to be played played. Played to the end. He can’t escape the carriage driver, when he plays his last card here in this inn in the darkness: the trump of hearts.

In Herz sticht Albert Ostermaier offers an artistic variation on Thomas Bernhard's tale Watten – Ein Nachlaß into a "piece that performs and writes itself."

The poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini was a passionate footballer who saw and celebrated the universal dimension of football. For him, football offered the possibility of an ideal world. Whether in the stadiums or on the dusty pitches of the suburbs, the game was a celebration, the ball the object of the most intimate love. The players could become heroes or gods, regardless of their background or status. Football as the true communism? In his highly poetic monologue, Albert Ostermaier carries Pasolini's passion forward. And tells of an almost religious devotion to the game. And of the dreams of young players of advancement, fame and honour, which threaten to burst under the inhuman pressure and unfulfillable expectations. And of forbidden love. Because it is not only the love of the ball that glows in the hearts of young men, but sometimes also the love between them. Even if the love for football is a very male one, male love in football is always a taboo. And so the hearts and bodies of young players are still sacrificed on the altar of the ‘church of the poor’ – money, because ‘what are the club managers if not the priests of capitalism?’ A haunting reflection on the contradictions of football and at the same time a passionate declaration of love for the ball and the footballer Pier Paolo Pasolini. Football is a man's sport, they say. Football is a sport in which men love men, I say.

Marcel is a consultant, a frequent flyer, a high performer. His numerous business trips have taken him around the world several times, from airport to airport, always on the go, an existence in a hurry, barely arrived and already on the road again. Until he suddenly finds himself stuck in quarantine in Wuhan. Because a virus is on its way, with similar efficiency as Marcel and just as transformable. Like in a fever dream Marcel jumps through time and space. Flashes of memories of a childhood full of humiliations alternate with descriptions of sinister places of exploitation of humans and animals. Slaughterhouses, exotic markets - everywhere the virus has been, Marcel has also been on his journey. Or is it an escape? Because who is Marcel, really? Is he Patient Zero, who travels as a superspreader on behalf of the virus somewhere between megalomania and greed, lust for revenge and endless forlornness? A dystopian optimizer on his apocalyptic ride across the global financial markets?
Albert Ostermaier lets his restless protagonist race through a brilliant text with an insane love of language. At the end of each sentence, a new thought ignites, one fantastic chain of associations infects the next: an intoxicating monologue full of highly infectious energy.

Roland Barthes holds a seminar. He talks to selected students about Goethe's Werther and the language of love. It is a complicated web of relationships that shapes the discourse; the students hang on the lips of their famous teacher and depend on his words. And of course, jealousies and flirtations turn the seminar room into a place of competition: who is seen, who belongs. The discourse becomes physical, the thought becomes a touch. As Barthes says: Desire circulates. And in doing so, it fluidly crosses boundaries between literary and sexual experimentation, between admiration and dependence. Above all this, another discourse continues and enters the seminar: that between Roland Barthes and his beloved mother, who is seriously ill and will soon die.

Together, the seminar spells out an alphabet of love. The collective as a remedy against the sad reality "that the discourse of love today is of extreme loneliness".