There's a Globe Stuck in my Throat

Two heroes of the world of sports who couldn’t be more different; two lives spent on the bike seat could not have been more different. Two heroes of cycling who divided Switzerland into two camps in the 1950s. On the one side, there was the ascetic Ferdinand Kübler, who came from the most humble of circumstances, and who pedaled with an iron self-discipline to the top of the cycling world. After his departure from racing, he built up a solid bourgeois existence. But he was also one of the first cyclists to be accused of doping.

On the other side, there was the bon vivant Hugo Koblet, the "pédaleur de charme", who rarely pedaled over the finish line ungroomed, who loved fast cars and beautiful women and had to end his career tragically—after, against his will, amphetamines where injected into him and his heart was damaged.

In his play, the Swiss author Gerhard Meister presents the biographies of two exceptional sportsmen. The duel between asceticism and sensual delight opens up into a furious final spurt against the backdrop of the fascinating world of cycling. In this Requiem, he tells of a time when the prize money was still low, doping had just begun, and the riders were largely on their own. (Stadttheater Bern)

Gerhard Meister creates a panorama of the time of the historically authentic Pension Comi in Zürich on the eve of the Second World War. At the centre are the owners of the pension, Wolodja and Paula Friedmann. From Jewish emigrants to musicians and unsuccessful revolutionaries, they give refuge to those persecuted by the Nazis. With no end in sight to the flood of refugees, moral questions emerge: can they keep taking people in without ending up in difficulty themselves?
The subject matter is Switzerland’s historical-political dealings with refugees, but through this debate the play also tries to draw parallels with current issues around refugees. The little forgotten stories from back then cast the bigger picture and the migration of our times in another light. (Announcement Schauspielhaus Zürich)

People talk about art - about what makes an artist, what he does and how his work relates to society. The great Sigmar Polke dealt with these questions throughout his entire artistic life. Always reflecting. Often ironical. And: always with the creative intransigence of a revolutionary.
With his work, he researched what art is, what art can do. As Artifex Doctus, he had a broad art-historical horizon. But as a universally interested person, he also dealt with the physics of colours and optical effects in a very concrete way, investigating the material basis of art and thus the spirit that lies within it. And, of course, Polke was also: the mischievous educated bourgeois who flatly rejected the established art establishment, made fun of it - and was all the more loved and revered for it by those he so ridiculed.
With Wir reden über Polke, das sieht man doch! (We're talking about Polke, can't you tell?), Gerhard Meister attempts to approach through Sigmar Polke the concept of art as well as the concrete significance of art for our lives and existence: with an open heart and the sense of sight that unites theatre and visual art.
There are countless reasons to engage with the artist-man and his creative spirit at any time. In 2021 Polke would have turned 80 - we are happy to take this as an opportunity to do just that in our current season! (Announcement Landestheater Bregenz)

His dismissal came like a streak of lightning out of the blue. Since then he has been at home. He never left the house again. He sits and does nothing. She practices her patience. He will get ahold of himself again. Nothing has been lost, not yet anyway. Don’t we live in the very best position possible? Aren’t we protected against all hazards by walls and video surveillance?

Certainly, she thinks, everything will be better when they can get away on vacation. This will set him free from his gloomy thoughts, and she'll be rid of this terrible city for a week or two, where she finds a dead bum on the sidewalk during her walk in the park. But instead of getting excited about the holiday, he gets himself a new cleaning woman, and one from Kleefeld no less, a high-rise housing estate that has become the worst ghetto in the city. She wants to get rid of the maid immediately. He does not even want to think about dismissing her.

Instead of everything getting better, everything gets worse. He has developed a grim pleasure in the free fall into which his existence has been pushed, and now works systematically towards the final collision.

"Friend, stop complaining - we're sailing to America
Soon you will have something in your stomach - America is close "

Imagine: the country is starving, and only those who leave their homeland on an unsafe ship have a chance to escape the misery. That which for us is an abstract thought experiment was brutal reality for the grandparents of our grandparents. Around the middle of the 19th century, bitter poverty prevailed in Europe. Capitalism had started its reign, but for many it meant only poverty and distress. Tens of thousands left their homeland each year in search of a better future. America was by far the most frequent destination.

Gerhard Meister's play tells the story of Annemarie and Michel, Erika, Hans and Christian, who have to leave their homeland for America. At the same time, he places the different continents and times on a spinning carrousel. America becomes Europe, Europe becomes Africa, and, not infrequently, Europe collides with Europe. The 19th and 21st centuries merge into an arc of colored and sometimes dramatic images. It may happen that the inhabitants of New York, at the beach on Coney Island with a vanilla ice-cream in their hands, meet swamped, half-dead emigrants who have been shipwrecked on their flight from Europe. And although it sometimes seems as if the author has finally been overcome by his imagination, the play America is based on events which have all occurred and are still happening.

Gerhard Meister gathers together moments of a world whose contours lose themselves in an incomprehensible threat...

How does the brain produce consciousness, and why? Is consciousness something that only arises in brains, or does it occur elsewhere? And why did the ancient Egyptians throw away the brain—the only organ disposed of in mummification? In this piece, the brain tries to find the answers to these questions, and thus goes on a trip, during which reality gradually dissolves more and more.

"It starts with the fact that she is completely exhausted and has only one goal: to get into the bathtub. Then comes the call. As a journalist, she cannot say no to the most renowned feuilleton in the country, so she will go to this interview. The music groupd Shark Kiss has already sold a million records in England, but she didn’t even know the name of the band. The taxi ride to the airport is a torture, and then the flight itself is worse. But somehow she manages it. She works, even when no one around her works and everything is still. But the longer she works, the more it becomes clear that her night shift is only a pretense.

Gerhard Meister's text about burnout is translated into atmospheric fragments in the production - a momentary sketch of a person is created. You stand at the crossroads: do you pull yourself together again, or do you stay down?" (Announcement Red Factory)

"The strength of Gerhard Meister's insight lies in the extremely precise everyday situations he describes. The author deals with burnout syndrome, currently a hot topic, and he does so in a ... presssing way." (Neue Zürcher Zeitung)

"Yeah, you should get your comedy. Or perhaps a fairy tale? Whatever. Anyway, in the leading role there’s a lonely poet at work on his manuscript." Once upon a time there was a lonely poet sitting over his manuscript and forcing out verse after verse. The work was laborious, and becoming more laborious. Who was that Nathan, whom he had sweated out line by line, and what did this Nathan have to do with himself, the old, deadly illl man who had grown bitter? What, for God’s sake, was he doing there? And for whom was he doing it? He could do nothing more with this Nathan. He had gotten up again and again, enough already. Had hidden away the death of his wife and child in his heart, and his own sick body, and the censorship. Now it was no longer possible.

How had he ever pinned the murder of his wife and children on Nathan and then do what with him? Guess. Hide away. Who hides something like this? Who the hell was as wise as Nathan? He wasn’t anyway, that was more and more clear. And this Nathan, what was he then? A rickety marionette, on whom he had painted a wise face, verse by verse. Enough."

Stilleben Herr mit Kätzchen was created as commission for the Staatstheater Braunschweig and was presented to the public for the first time in a workshop production on the occasion of the 275th birthday of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. This contemporary approach to the classical author offers an ideal frame for the productions of his original plays.

The piece intertwines four stories, all of which are told in monologues and theatrical scenes. There is the woman who returns to her country twenty years after a nuclear accident; and except for the cows on the pasture, nothing is as it was before. There is also the landlady from Rössli—development workers explain to her how to cook low-radiation food, as if any one of her customers was interested in radiation. In a helicopter, a young couple flies over the destroyed land to go skiing in the Alps, but on the return flight the helicopter needs to land. And there is the man in his apartment who refuses to join into the disaster hysteria.

MAN IN THE APARTMENT: "Maximum Credible Accident? You want to make the Maximum Credible Accident? And when do you want to do it? This week is very difficult. Everything is booked out. Next week, same thing. So there’s just Wednesday afternoon from three to half past four, if that works for you. How long does such a Maximum Credible Accident take? Aha, I understand, then it won’t work on Wednesday, of course. Too bad."

"Enjoy a steam bath in the cooling tower," a nuclear power plant advertises for a visit of the plant. As I stand in the boundless half-dark of forty degree steam, I think, admittedly, such a visit is an experience. More interesting, however, is to imagine what happens when such a thing explodes.” (Gerhard Meister)

Chur in the hot summer of 1947: a serial murderer of young women terrifies the town.
Suspicion soon falls on a young man who works as a farmhand in a poorhouse. After the first interrogation he flees to the mountains and a merciless hunt begins.
But Walter Caminada of the local police encounters inconsistencies in his investigations. The traces lead him to the madhouse, but also to the highest circles of the local government - until Caminada himself gets into trouble... (Announcement Freilichtspiele Chur)

Friedrich Miescher, who became a pioneer of genetic research through his discovery of nucleic acid in 1869, fell ill with tuberculosis at the age of fifty. He spent the last one and a half years of his life in the lung hospital of Doctor Turban in Davos.
Miescher's failure due to his early death and his unfinished work is the starting point of this play, and of the dream which penetrates the solitude of the sick-room more and more deeply.

Short, minimalistic scenes between the doctor, the patient and the nurse Anna reflect the monotony of the patients' day in constantly recurring dialogue sequences. Scaffold-like, they hold the piece together. At first, the scenes are written by Anna, in her letters to her distant lover. Thus, she still maintains contact with life outside the hermetic world of the sanatorium. Later on, Miescher's dreams or fever delusions increasingly determine the progress of things, and testify to his unstoppably advancing disease.

Contrary to his own maxim, the pragmatist Turban comes more and more under the spell of the theorist Miescher. More and more, he encourages him to ask questions about his research. As the distance between the doctor and the patient gradually disappears, Anna falls deeper and deeper into the maelstrom of her relationship with Miescher.

His death at the end of the play means not only his own tragic failure in his unfinished work, but also that of the doctor. And Anna writes to her beloved that he must forget her. She will not leave Davos.

Mieschers Traum came about as part of the Dramenprozessor, a project for young Swiss authors. It was presented in June 2002 in a scenic reading at the Theater an der Winkelwiese in Zurich.

Who hasn’t had the idea before: I’m stopping here, I’m done with everything, I'm not going to go on anymore. Of course you don’t carry through with it. You are rational and don’t want to lose everything you have and everything you have tried to believe in: career, family, future. Gerhard Meister's latest play has an absentee in its center, one who stood up from his workplace and, from one moment to the next, left behind his career, family, and future - to feed ducks. Der Entenfreund revolves around a missing person who does not speak himself, but who is present in the conversations which are carried out between his wife and a childhood friend, his superior, and his successor; then there is also the woman from the company who talks about him as if he were her lover, and a man who is busy with the extermination of vermin, to which, in his mind, the duck friend belongs more and more.

In this play, Gerhard Meister sketches the portrait of a man in dialogues and monologues. From different perspectives and different lives, different images of a completely fascinating man arise. Through his inexplicable behavior, the apparently self-evident way of life of the others falls apart under the pressure to explain itself.

In September 2004, Der Entenfreund was honored with the special prize of the Société Suisse des Auteurs. Gerhard Meister wrote the play in the 2003/04 season whilst on a scholarship of the Kunststiftung Baden-Württemberg.

"What should I do next to get myself going?"
Who decides the point at which you're too old for certain things? For hopscotch, affairs, camping holidays. Can you still rob a bank when you're almost eighty? Or is that no longer taken seriously? Isn't it even a morally valuable act if she robs a bank and redistributes the money like Robin Hood - or loosely based on Bertolt Brecht, according to whom robbing a bank is not a crime compared to founding a bank? An old woman and a young man enter the stage. A play begins in which perception seems to blur: memories come back to life - or were they just wishes, dreams, longings? Is the present definitely the now? And how real is reality? Nothing is certain in this evening on stage ...
The Immortal
"Writing a play for the actress Heidi Maria Glössner was the commission given to the author and spoken word artist Gerhard Meister, who is part of the authors' group "Bern ist überall". An endeavour in which he has clearly succeeded: Glössner takes the stage for herself from the very first moment. It is a parade role for the 80-year-old actress, who does not seem to age. The scene in which she announces to her heir hunter son that she is immortal and that her doctor has just congratulated her on her blood results is easy to believe." (Der Bund / BZ)

"Rosa was born in Argentina. She has lived there all her life. Rosa's mother died. Rosa does not know her father. The only thing she possesses from him are a few photo slides. He is probably a German. Rosa is considering the possibility of looking for this man, to get to know him. Rosa has never been to Europe, and neither have Bárbara, Evangelina and Raquel. All that they know of the First World is what they have heard somewhere. Or read. Now they intend to give Rosa advice. Is there such a thing as belonging? Is it possible to have roots and an inheritance? Is there an older and more stable First World? In no case, however, can there be a space which is free of discourse. And when the earth belongs to the Father (Fatherland), language belongs to the Mother." (Romina Paula)

"This play is about the images and ideas that we have about ourselves and about strangers. The stranger is longed for and feared, he is both daydream and nightmare. But what do we know about ourselves and and about strangers? To what extent do these images and ideas refer to a truth that is hidden, and to what extent do they produce this truth? In a kind of laboratory situation, four women go on a research trip that confronts them with such pictures and stories. At the center is Rosa Tureo, a young Argentinian in search of her German father, whom she has never seen before." (Gerhard Meister)

The play was created within the framework of DRAMATURGIAS CRUZADAS (directed by Erik Altorfer and Hartmut Becher), with the support of the Swiss Cultural Foundation Pro Helvetia and the Goethe Institute in Buenos Aires. The workshop production of the preliminary version took place in Espacio Callejón in Buenos Aires on 6 September 2010 and was directed by Romina Paula.

1918 – not a good year in Europe: The continent is in a state of turmoil and dissolution, the Habsburg monarchy has broken down and nobody in Austria knew how the young republic would develop. Whether it was viable at all. This lack of orientation also reigned in Vorarlberg, as well as a great famine which could only be ameliorated a little by aid from Switzerland. In this situation, the Lustenau teacher Ferdinand Riedmann put himself at the front of a movement which had as its aim to initiate talks with Switzerland about accession to the country. In May 1919, there was a plebiscite: 80,7% of the Vorarlberg population was in favour. However, Switzerland gave a cold shoulder to the poor neighbours, and the Allies also refused the desire: Many borders were newly drawn, but Vorarlberg remained with Austria. A hundred years have gone by since those restless days; Europe has become much more unstable again, is being challenged more than we thought possible during the last decades. A good moment to throw a double glance back and forward – and across the border: An Austrian and a Swiss dramatist write a play each for this double evening. Two neighbouring countries, two writers of different generations, two different perspectives on the “Kanton Left-over” – which was the nickname for Vorarlberg after the failed approach which is regarded differently perhaps from a Swiss perspective today. (Announcement Vorarlberger Landestheater Bregenz)