Peggy Pickit sees the Face of God

“Five unemployed actors stand in front of the old, red curtain after their theatre has closed.” “It needs no further explanation. It’s not important, it’s painful.” – That's how Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play Keine Arbeit für die junge Frau im Frühlingskleid opens. It is about fragmented connections, about the imaginary or real stories of five actors. About theatre and theatre people. About “borrowed CVs”, perhaps, as was once said. Or, about life, memories and above all desire, which are presented in Schimmelpfennig’s writing like elaborate role plays. In Eric Rohmer’s films or in Botho Strauß’s early prose, there were similarly scattered conversations, puzzles, logical holes, absurdities. And a functional poetry of language.
The actors show up in pairs in these strange stories. They talk, they act as if in waking dreams. (…) There are always glitches in the concrete, flights into fantasy – apocalypse, hopes, they are madly talking at cross purposes. In the end, the older actress is engaged as Eliza Doolittle in New York and says goodbye. Her? She’s too old. “We’re not in the movies. Theatre would be completely impossible if you thought like that!”
(Ingrid Seidenfaden, Der Tagesspiegel on the world premiere at the Munich Kammerspiele on April 4, 1996)

A midsummer night’s dream on the city fringes. Mysterious and dangerous. No one dances like Turan. But everyone desires her because of her dancing, they want to conquer her, to own her. Or try as hard as they can to steal the dance from her – for Saturday evening is coming round again and of course everyone wants to go dancing. Pairs form and break up:
“I found Turan with Gigi at the lake, where they were practicing dancing – I stung her in her ear and sucked her dance up into me. I nearly got hit while doing it because Gigi spotted me. In the blink of an eye it was all over, she couldn’t do a single step, she couldn’t put one foot in front of the other. Gigi left the suffering girl in an instant, and Gregor, too, who used to love Turan, he left her lying unconscious at the edge of the lake to run after Magda, who herself was going dancing with Gigi tonight, although she used to love Gregor and followed him around like a shadow.”
All this is reported by the housekeeper, who became a mosquito for a night, but that is another story…
This play seems to border a land between yesterday and tomorrow: unreal, realised, like a “star-distant world” (Roland Barthes). And yet, set between a swimming pool and a supermarket, it tells of the desperate desire, once in a lifetime – even if only for one night – to be loved and to be something special.

A wedding reception, outdoors on a summer’s evening. It is late, but still warm. A few of the guests have instruments with them. Now and then, they play a few bars of a melody. There is lots of eating and drinking. A woman is speaking into a pram. In the middle of the tableau sit the bride and groom. She thought she would ride to church in a horse-drawn carriage, and she thought it was unbelievable that her groom was getting totally drunk at their wedding. It’s the story of Katja and Georg. As it is, what it was like and what might come. How Georg, the jilted one, might lose his mind and – with his brass instrument, an old horn – wander through the fields and woods outside the city.
Suddenly, it starts to rain. Snow falls to the ground. The moon rises, it is night and spring might be coming. Maybe you can hear a few birds. The here and now. The now or never. Sooner or soon. Unfortunately not. Too late, too early. Not now. Never again. (Schauspielhaus Zürich)

“A story as simple and enigmatic, as banal and cruel as life itself.” (nachtkritik)
“When Schimmelpfennig writes with such fabulous concentration, with such humorous detachment as he does here, he shows himself to be one of our strongest playwrights.” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)
“Capital staging, great performances: the Zürich opening of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s Hier und Jetzt makes the magic of the theatre palpable.” (Tagesanzeiger)

Maria and Karl want to get married. But the boy next door is away, and without the boy, the pair can’t wed. Karl goes looking for the boy and brings him back. The boy has a missing eye.
Karl and Maria celebrate their wedding. Maria wants to go away with Karl to build a new life together – open a bakery or a cheap hair salon.
On the night of the wedding, Karl’s brother Fritz shows up. Karl is supposed to go with him: Fritz knows someone that is looking for a couple for their hair salon. It’s urgent. Karl leaves without his wife. He puts the wedding ring on Maria’s finger while she is sleeping.
Maria has now been waiting for Karl for a year. Franz, Karl’s father, convinces Maria to marry him. But she can’t get Karl’s ring off her finger any more. Maria sends the boy to look for Karl before she gets married. She gives him a big knife to take with him.
At night, Karl comes to Maria and wants to take her away with him. He is now the owner of the hair salon. He has murdered the boy. Karl claims to have written to her. Maria never got his letters.
Roland Schimmelpfennig’s characters are unsettling, and their story remains a mystery…
“Things are not easy. They might seem easy, because they seem to follow a pattern. Every character sees the story from a different side. Which one should I pick out and tell? In the end, someone is right and someone is wrong – but can you say definitively who? Franz? Maria? Karl? (not, that I don’t know) – Or no one is right and no one is wrong: those are the worst plays of all – I have tried to explain why life is hard for Maria, Karl, Franz and the others. It’s hard.” (Roland Schimmelpfennig)

The place: an empty stage. The signs: a bicycle, a roccocco dress and suitcases. Voices and sounds. A song. Gestures and situations. Vanishing points. Ruptures and repetitions in a script of eighty-one short scenes for the stage.

The story of the bicycle and a man, for instance.
“He rides repeatedly in wide circles on the empty stage. He circles and circles. He stops. Looks fixedly at the opposite wall, gets a running start and races toward it.
Blackout.
Sound of impact.“

A play with moments. Miniatures which are lit shortly and then hidden again. Intervals of scenic action and splinters of dialogue. Fragments of breath as a game of questions. Under the taciturn dialogues lies a concealed story.
The moments correspond with each other, show motives that repeat themselves with an acrobatic ease, they double, they triple, become more and more turbulent images. Variations, new constellations and combinations of actions and characters, in “a kind of comic kamikaze” (Schimmelpfennig). The empty stage as the place for a delicate net of encounters and relationships, written like a film maker, a painter and a poet.

Andrej: No prisoners! That would change the whole war.
No prisoners! Kill everyone and die yourself!
Let’s get the whole thing done as soon as possible,
why drag the whole thing out unnecessarily?
The goal of war is murder,
the weapons of war are espionage and treason,
the destruction of countries and the plundering of populations.
What holds the army together?
Discipline, idleness, cruelty, drunkenness.
But nevertheless, all emperors, other than the Chinese, wear uniform,
He who kills the most people is promoted,
a thanksgiving mass is even held for
having killed thousands upon thousands of people.
But how does God receive these prayers?
Short pause
See you next time!
Short pause
That’s what one says: see you next time,
even if there will never be a next time for us.

23rd December: Albert’s mother-in-law comes to visit. His wife leaves it to him to greet her. The relationship between the two women is complicated. But the relationship between the married couple is, too. And the relationships get even more complicated when Rudolph rings the doorbell – an acquaintance from a train ride of his mother-in-law’s. Albert, a Holocaust researcher, can only bear the hours that follow with a lot of wine and painkillers. Especially when it turns out that the distinguished Rudolph has just arrived from Paraguay.

“The building blocks of our world are at the centre of Roland Schimmelpfennig’s play. But years ago, Pierre Boulez, the great composer and conductor, was a blockhead when he recommended that all opera houses should be blown up. Of course, Boulez didn’t actually want that to happen – and Schimmelpfennig really doesn’t want it to, not even to the theatres. Otherwise he wouldn’t have written a play such as this. Otherwise he wouldn’t have drawn from the treasures of his education, from all the games of piggy-in-the-middle, from Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream to Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy through to Der Park by Botho Strauß. “Meet me in the palace wood, a mile without the town; there will we rehearse,” are the words in Midsummer Night’s Dream. What is Schimmelpfennig rehearsing?
He is gleefully describing a theatre director who burns down his theatre. The director releases himself from the obligation of art and goes out into the woods. But what is happening there? A play. Tangled love. He does not find wood, the material from which the world and the theatre is constructed. For this he finds the architect, who is supposed to find the building materials for the theatre. But both they and their love-addled wood partners become trees, wood, potential building material. The theatre can’t die if you don’t want to saw up the people that have turned into building material. The trees, the building material, want to become people and – perform in the theatre. But – see above – the theatre has burned down, the people that want the theatre have become wood, trees, building material. And that won’t do at all. Schimmelpfennig’s play lets theatre die out of love for the theatre. A young author is attacking what he loves. Just like real love. It’s often just blocked up. And an excursion into the woods leads back to the city, in which the theatre, at a pinch, can get by without building materials.” (Gerd Jäger)

What happens when someone insists on love above all other bonds? Everything is packed. A family is moving. Frank and Claudia, along with their nearly grown son, Andi, are leaving the place where they have enjoyed nearly twenty years of marriage and raised their son. The hallway is filled with mountains of boxes. A melancholy air blows through the empty apartment. Andi will have to say goodbye to his first girlfriend, Tina. Old remembrances surface as the last box is packed. Suddenly the doorbell rings. Frank opens the door. Standing there is Romy, Frank's first love: "You swore that you'd love me forever. Now I've come to hold you to that promise."

Three Germans drive into Anytown, USA, looking for their piece of the american dream. They've come all the way from Berlin to rent a buildung and start up a business. There are just a few problems: one's starving, one's missing, one's gotten involved in certain practices and they're all broke. But the biggest problem is their would-be american landlord, Ike, who just doesn't get their business plan: "What I want to know is this: I come in here, in to your store, and what happens then: Whatr are you going to sell me? What ca I buy her?" Micha: "Nothing."

Tom, a mobile operator, built his house up high. So close to heaven, but so far from God. Greatest luxury, no mobile network, just him, his wife Sue and the housekeeper Maria. They invite artists like Sophia, who is allowed to bring her migration background and her lover Jared, into their faraway world. They are sublime up here, the wealth is great as well as the casualness with which they drink their expensive wine, make their art and conduct their conversations. About the ghetto, the slaves, the tear through society and the ten plagues. But then, visions and apparitions: Frogs, bloodstreams, locusts, stillbirths. And the oozing of a hunch. Is that God who intervenes punitively? Or are they just natural disasters?

Prologue The story of the city of Thebes begins with a double murder. After Kadmos has searched in vain for his sister Europa, abducted by Zeus, on the continent, he turns to the Oracle of Delphi. "Forget the sister," is the answer, "drive a cow before you and where she settles, found a city." Kadmos chases the cow until it collapses dead near a spring, which in turn is guarded by a dragon. Kadmos kills it, breaks out its teeth and sows them in the ground. Armed dragon men immediately grow out of the teeth, warriors who slaughter each other - only five survive the massacre. With them, Kadmos founds the city of Kadmeia, later known as the seven-gated Thebes. From the very beginning, violence is inscribed in the history of civilisation. Even the first civilising measures for the founding of this original city of the western world are manifested as homicides. The destruction of the animal and the animal being is, so to speak, the prerequisite for being able to exist as a society in urban space at all. But how can the acts of violence that shake the foundations of the human city from generation to generation be stopped? Dionysus The story of the birth of Dionysus from the thigh of Zeus sounds more than bizarre. No wonder nobody in Thebes wants to believe it after Dionysus' earthly mother Semele, a daughter of Kadmos, was so shamefully burnt to death. Supposedly, the father Zeus took the foetus out of the fire and carried it in his leg. In the meantime, Thebes has grown into a wealthy city and Kadmos has ceded the throne to his grandson Pentheus. Dionysus appears and claims that he is entitled to religious cult status. But Pentheus, trimmed to moderation and rules, refuses to believe him. Dionysus then plunges the patriarch's system of order into a deep political and moral crisis. He sends the women on a trip and spreads madness and frenzy among them. The frenzy ends cruelly and bloodily. Dionysus triumphs over the city's unbelievers. He seems to have uncovered a collective lust for violent destruction that is inherent in the construct of the "city" in its repressed positions. Euripides wrote his last and most radical tragedy with The Bacchae. The transposition and adaptation of The Bacchae under the new title Dionysus intensifies the conflicts between fantasies of doom and rational thinking, delusions of order and the desire for chaos, and raises contemporary questions about urban society. How much tension are we still prepared to endure? (Announcement Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

See aus Asche – Das Lied der Nibelungen tells the whole story: of Siegfried, who sets out to conquer the world, kills the dragon, captures treasure and the magic helmet, and finally ends up at the Burgundian court. Of Hagen von Tronje, who immediately identifies the dragon slayer as a dangerous rival, only to skilfully exploit him as a pawn in his power games. And of Kriemhild and Brunhild, the two dissimilar women whose fates are so closely linked to each other and to that of the supposed hero Siegfried. The result is a dense, almost intoxicating journey through the Song of the Nibelungs – a combination of ancient myth with the power of great fantasy and the immediacy of our modern world.

Roland Schimmelpfennig’s first script fights hard for mysterious objects, for fish and for life. The story begins directly: “Give me the shoes,” the young man demands of the old and all of a sudden breaks into his hut. He wants to catch fish, in the middle of winter, the blue herrings under the ice. For this he needs things that the young girl finds on her invisible path. They are tangible, visible, useful and concrete. And yet they transform before your very eyes like in a fairy tale. A spoon turns into an oar and then a key made from gold and silver. The young girl climbs out of the kitchen window, jumping over big rocks on steep paths. The young man comes and vanishes through walls or invisible doors. The old man sits in the hut and sees nothing. A stranger appears in the wasteland and encounters the young girl. She wants to dance with him, but he leaves. “People can’t just vanish.” The stranger is the “man outside”. He comes and he goes. “The man outside” stays outside. “There is no one outside,” says the old man and divides the miraculously speaking fish up between the three of them.
Roland Schimmelpfennig tells an enigmatic story, laying tracks that lead to no goal, but which we nevertheless follow with anticipation, and inventing characters that seem real but which mysteriously elude your grasp. A language without embellishment, clear and meaningful, and yet hermetically closed to any obvious meaning.
Fisch um Fisch (awarded the 1997 Else-Lasker-Schüler-Förder prize) is as thrilling as a whodunit, as distant as a myth, as cryptic as an incantation and as innocent as a children’s story.

Inspector Corinth is sent to an apartment block. In an apartment that it is locked from the inside, he finds a man, Hans Fischer, who has been dead for two days, and a tape recorder without any tapes. Who could have reported the death if he hadn’t told anyone he was committing suicide? So was it murder? Hans Fischer worked for the police as a retired surveillance specialist but couldn’t resist bugging things in his private life, too. Corinth finds tapes in a hidden compartment on which he can hear voices and noises from an apartment in the building, and decides to spend the night there. He finds more and more new tapes and what is revealed is ever more shocking and frightening. And then he hears himself. For the last time.

It takes six years for some. Day by day, they are a part of it in Das Reich der Tiere (The Animal Kingdom). The costumes leave their mark, but the actors disappear into their roles. Featherless and fur free, they are invisible and exchangeable. Identifications make them antelopes, genets, marabous. Magnificently costumed, they tell of the cunning of the lion and the good nature of the zebra. Of coups d’etat and despotism. Of the fall of the winners as well as the losers.
Roland Schimmelpfennig links fable with the here and now. He tells a tale of how cunning weaves strong nets, of how good nature can bring you to a standstill. How the lion can turn into a fried egg and antelopes into toast. How quality can be the victim of arbitrariness and the profane the victor of taste. And how quickly such a net can tear again.
In a fascinating mixture of stage spectacle and chamber play, Das Reich der Tiere reveals the mechanisms of power and the ambiguity of victory. After all, success always has its flipside.

A beautiful giant cricket is exploited by an ant, stewardesses 30,000 feet in the air speak to boat people in the Atlantic, a tooth lands in a bowl of soup, and a dead boy is carried thousands of miles home on a river. Wielding a dreamlike kaleidoscope, making and remaking connections that span the globe, Schimmelpfennig tells The Golden Dragon’s tragicomic tale of globalization. It’s set in your local takeout, wherever it and whomever you might be.

It has to be really dark when children and their parents go out into the night with their lanterns. And, just like every year, there are lots of pairs of children and halves of parents. They drag the little ones, shove the big ones, follow the light. And, just like every year, the halves chat with the other halves. So, unfortunately, no one notices when the little one quickly ducks back because he left his car somewhere. Out of the light and into the dark. Across the street. Dangerous. Especially the father who gets to his car much too late after mass. Much too late to get to the next one on time. Much too late to calmly get comfortable. It’s new, after all, the big, black car. Much too late, and the car is still stubborn and the music is too loud and his nerves are frayed and his thoughts far away. And the black monster only feels a slight resistance. Under the wheels. On the street. Barely discernible. Was that something? A flying child?
Roland Schimmelpfennig drives the tragic death of a child into your flesh like a thorn. Right from the beginning, he leaves no shadow of a doubt that the lantern procession will end badly. The women pronounce bleak prophecies. The sewerage workers beneath the street are unsettled. Like harassing fire, the moral failures of the parents flicker through the funeral song. Because as if the loss of the child weren’t bad enough, a friendly father caught the attention of the mother during the procession and furtively caught her hand. And as if the guilt over the death of the child weren’t bad enough, the father was driving not only in an unfamiliar car but also in eager anticipation of an auspicious encounter with a beautiful stranger. Guilt is flying around with the dead child. And settles on the shoulders of those who have lost. No ifs or buts. Because ifs and buts don’t exist any more.

People living in Africa mine coltan in deadly conditions. People living in Europe use coltan in luxurious conditions: in their mobile phones. The unnoticed tragedy of a mining accident in the never-ending rain of Africa is caught in a network of scraps of conversation typical of modern communication.

A small house on the edge of the city. Terraced houses, modest single-occupancy homes, gardens front and back – everything is kept in order. A summer evening. A family is having dinner. The wife, the daughter, the son. A man comes home. And he is already sitting there.
The two men look at each other; nobody screams. A leap in time. The clock winds back. The sun travels through the sky from west to east. Morning. The day begins again. Get up. “Good morning.” Breakfast with the family. Go to work. A leap in time. On this summer’s day, there are ripples and waves in the flow of time. A fissure in reality. An anomaly in time and space. Here, at the edge of the city. In these hours, day and night intertwine, nothing will ever be as it was before.

Antigone, this indomitable rebel against the male rage for order, marks the end of the ruling dynasty of the Labdakids. Here the circle closes, and it is no coincidence that the most famous lines about the Anthropos come from this tragedy by Sophocles: "Many things are mighty, but nothing is mightier than man." Roland Schimmelpfennig translates Antigone into a contemporary poetic language that makes female resistance to the powerful state of Thebes and its politics seem extremely contemporary. Antigone's uncle Creon, the eternal second man in the state, has finally come to power after many years of being a proxy. The war of aggression against Thebes has just been averted when Creon is already in danger of failing in his first official act: he has to pass judgement on his niece Antigone, who values her ethical imperative above the law of the state. But Creon is convinced that morality is a poor political counsellor. He sentences Antigone to a punishment that could not be more barbaric: She is to be walled up alive. Humanity is sacrificed in favour of law-abidance. Once again, the city's system collapses in an act of violence that breaks through the surface of its beautiful appearance. (Announcement Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

The conflict between the brothers Eteocles and Polyneikes is about the limits of diplomacy. After their father Oedipus blinds himself, they are entrusted with power. Polyneikes accuses his brother of not honouring the agreement on the annual change of government and threatens to take the city of Thebes in a war of aggression with the help of allies. Mother Iocasta forces the two to the negotiating table: speech before revenge. She appeals to human autonomy and the freedom of choice. But what if the subjective sense of justice and the law are not congruent, as in the case of Polyneikes, who sees himself cheated out of the throne? Diplomacy requires the ability to renounce. Yet the "unwillingness to give in" is symptomatic of Oedipus' family. Neither he nor his father Laios gave way when they faced each other at the crossroads. Eteocles does not relinquish his claim to power, nor does Polyneikes. And little Antigone will later insist on a proper first funeral for her brother, even under threat of death. Iokaste is inspired by Euripides' adaptation of the myth under the title The Phoenissae and the tragedy Seven against Thebes by Aeschylus, which is around 60 years older. The text Iokaste turns the screw further into the here and now. Modern trouble spots cannot be extinguished by military intervention. Since the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war in February 2022, this tale of murderous fratricidal conflict and the failure of diplomacy has become alarmingly topical. (Announcement Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

The man without a dog, a rocker, cashiers, construction workers, three Romanians, the woman with the photo shop, a publican, tram passengers…
They meet accidentally, pass each other by or touch each other briefly, they are connected, mostly without even knowing it: people in a big city. They are in their own bubbles, speak for and about themselves and sometimes only with themselves. Through scenes that highlight this, the melange of people form a whole panorama.
On Greifswalder Street, their threads are woven together, threads that are stretched to breaking point. Right at the beginning, the prophecy: “I am here to warn you, Rudolf. Be careful of the tall girl. Be careful of the giraffe.” He only has 24 hours left. Rudolf runs through the streets and pubs searching for an answer: What should he do with the time he has left?
Twenty-four hours. The sun seems to stay still in the heavens, for everyone. The engine runs, stutters and stops now and again. There is a rupture in day-to-day life.
“It seems to me that the whole city is waiting for something.
It seems to me as if I myself am waiting.”
Like Robert Altmann in Short Cuts, Schimmelpfennig draws a slice of the present together, concentrating it. A present with a false bottom, however, that holds a secret in its chance moments, something inscrutable that puts people off their stride.

On the Isla Negra in Chile stands the little house Pablo Neruda lived in. Today, it’s a place of remembrance. And in this museum house, two people keep watch, Arturo and Malva. They sit, they stand, they guard, they explain, they dream. Day after day. The strangest people visit and the oddest things happen. The mysticism of those who make love in the beds of great artists, steal soap from erotic bathrooms, are surrounded by cicada-houses and narwhal tusks is interlaced with letters from Neruda’s mother to her beloved son. Full of care and love, the early-deceased accompanies the life journey of her Pablo and encourages him in a language that’s poetically touching. The lover regrets not having killed Neruda and made him hers forever in this way. And when Malva slips on the stolen soap, the cicada house comes down, Arturo caresses Malva’s long legs and realises that the largest of all bugs has escaped, their desires come true in a dream. Arturo goes on tour with his boss and takes all people who have ever travelled in his bus, Malva on the other hand now lives in Neruda’s house, until one day the tears of the little wooden statue flood the house and it disappears, spinning as if by magic into the distance of the sea.

Roland Schimmelpfenning and Justine del Corte have written Canto minor about the Chilean literature Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda on the occasion of his 100th birthday, commissioned by the National Theatre Santiago de Chile.

A country house in the middle of winter. A young woman thinks she can recognise the watchtower of a concentration camp in the logo of her mobile phone. A young man stands at the front door and wants to visit his father Heinrich – the father he has never seen in his whole life. Heinrich, an ageing intellectual who has been retranslating Paradise lost into German for years, has fallen in love with his young niece, Sonja, with whom he has just shot a duck – but nobody knows what to do with the animal. Do you gut it first or pluck it? Edith, Heinrich’s wife, falls in love with her husband’s newly arrived son, but he sleeps with Sonja on the day he arrives – and with Marietta, who has also come to visit.
Isabel, the young woman with the telephone, has been engaged by a theatre, but she doesn’t get any roles there. The Professor, an old companion of Heinrich’s from his student days, brings him an old photo that he thinks is someone else. And Nadja, her daughter, a student, ruins the Russian private library, which means nothing to the man of the house.
At the end: violence. At night in the bedroom, father and son threaten to shoot one another. (Roland Schimmelpfennig)

This family reunion quietly and calmly takes its course. Little annoyances are obscured by the seeming banality of everyday life like the green of the garden under the snow. And so the days and nights drift away with deceptive sluggishness, while those driven by desire become ever more entangled. Roland Schimmelpfennig’s story of these people is both comic and tragic.
Besuch bei dem Vater, the first part of the Trilogie der Tiere, revolves around the young man and seducer, Peter.

Triumphant, Idomeneus returns home from the Trojan War with his fleet. But shortly before Crete seventy-nine of his eighty ships sink. In despair Idomeneus invokes the sea. For his survival he promises to sacrifice the first living being that will cross his path in Crete. He doesn’t anticipate yet that it will be his son Idamantes. In Mozart’s opera Idomeneo Idamantes has the possibility to fight for his life and thereby soothe the oracle. On the basis of the same promise of sacrifice, Roland Schimmelpfennig plays through the variations of the Idomeneus saga which go from blood-drenched drama to seemingly peaceful ending. In changing choric compositions, men and women tell of the homecoming of the king, of the illusion of purchased happiness and the inevitable tragic outcome. Thus a myth of possibilities is told with chosen simplicity and precise beauty. A reflection on the saving temptation of the moment which can obscure the sight to that which follows. And what remains is the hope for a turn for the better, a hope for the forgiving god from Mozart’s opera. Tenderly and yet following the unrelenting law of the gods, Roland Schimmelpfennig takeson this king and decides, after some pros and cons, to let him have his last will. Even if only in a figurative sense.

"Three workmen
- Who says there’s no joist in there? –
- Joist – I don’t see any joist –
- But there could be one in there.
- Who says that’s not a load-bearing wall? –
- That can’t be a load-bearing wall –
- And if so –
- If so? If so, then –
- Then what?
- Yeah – then –
- There’s nothing in the plan –
- In the plan, yeah, but the plan – the plan isn’t made for this.
- The plan is the plan.
He looks at the plan.
- But who says that the plan is right? -
A short pause.
- Who says that the plan isn’t right?
With the plan in their hands, they look at one another, at a loss.”

A builder can’t get along with his workmen, and the workmen can’t get along with him. An old town house is supposed to be converted – nobody knows how things (and people) fit together, who is supporting what and what something is supporting, but everyone knows better.

A man has an accident in his truck. He leaves the cargo in the ditch and sets off for a better life. On his way to work in the morning, another finds the cartons lying around and hopes to find happiness as a street artist with the help of the colourful model balloons that he finds inside. One of them comes from the north, bringing the rain with him, and buys a revolver; the other comes from the south and has two tongues. Both fall in love with a young woman with snakes for hair. She works as a waitress and is accompanied by the west wind. From the four points of the compass, these people’s lives seem to come together arbitrarily. And only Madame Oiseau, the soothsayer from the east, knows that it is fate. And that today, someone will leave forever. (Announcement Deutsches Theater Berlin)

When covetous Pirithous wants to steal Persephone, Theseus accompanies his friend down into the kingdom of the dead. No one has ever returned from there before. But mighty Theseus breaks the rule and saves himself and his unredeemed friend. Together, they head home. But at home, another horror awaits them. At home, the wife has given her desire free reign. At home, Phaedra now loves Hippolytus, the son of Theseus. And on exactly the day that those believed dead return, there is a wedding that will unite the stepson with the wife of his father. Blind with rage, Theseus assaults Phaedra. But she exacts her revenge through suicide. And in death, she summons destruction.
The terrible suffering makes Theseus long for the underworld. But now Persephone denies him death. And even the furious Hippolytus, thirsty for revenge, does not manage to kill his father. Instead, Theseus is damned to life.

Three couples meet in a hotel to eat and love. They come one after another. And they don’t know that next door, their own husband is sleeping with another, and that their own wife is sleeping with someone else’s husband. But they are actually better matches like this. At least for the time being. But then the light flickers. On and off. Suddenly, Mrs Z has two heads and Mr A doesn’t have a mouth. Mr Y’s heart burns while Mrs A’s petrifies. The world is out of whack: Boulevard Fukushima.

The night is still young and the doors to Paradise are wide open. The black dog is waiting out the front. He doesn’t let everyone in. But if he does, nothing can stop you. Boom, boom, boom. Lights revolve above their heads. Alcohol pulses through their veins. 5 barmen, 3 Bulgarians, 2 Italians and 24 Frenchmen, 30 Spaniards, 4 Canadians, 12 Swedes, Norwegians, Russians, Danes, Belgians, Brits. Glances dart. Hearts race. Globalisation has come to Paradise. Barman Freddie’s 3 cousins drive everyone crazy. And in the middle of the beats, there are moments of closeness that make you forget that the magic only lasts for one night.

A group of men, women and children: they are all sitting in the train at 8:54 as it leaves the station. Without knowing that this will be the last time they ever go on a train. Because at 8:55, the train will blow up. How can the inconceivable be described? Or does only the describable happen in the minutes beforehand? When everything was still good and, while perhaps not easy, it was still possible. When the people in the train still had goals. Maybe they had been listening to their favourite song. And what was going on with the waitress Sally in the station café, who had been listening to “Bette Davis Eyes” on the radio? She let the cup drop from her hand in fright when she saw the explosion outside, right in front of her eyes. Was there really nobody nearby that could have saved the cup in time?

The most famous riddle of all time is solved by Oedipus. When asked by the Sphinx which creature has only one voice and sometimes two legs, sometimes three, sometimes four and the more legs it has, the weaker it is, Oedipus answers: "Man". The age of the Anthropocene has begun on a mythical level. The Sphinx is dead. But now that the riddles have been solved, the problems begin. Oedipus, who has just been prophesied to kill his father and marry his mother, is given the rule of Thebes as a reward for his triumph. An unprecedented decision by the city to hand over power to a stranger. At first, his "reasonable" reign seems to prove the citizens' petition right. The city prospers under his rule. But unknowingly, he slips deeper and deeper into his fate. With his mother Iocaste, he fathers four children: the sons Eteocles and Polyneikes and the daughters Antigone and Ismene. Then a plague epidemic breaks out in Thebes. This is the hour of the return of religion. Apollo, the priestess and the seer Teiresias strike back. The enlightened Oedipus leads the first circumstantial trial in world literature against himself. But in a final act of self-empowerment, he defends himself against the legacy of an absolute truth. In vain? With Oedipus, Sophocles has written a masterpiece of literary history. To this day, the tragedy inspires numerous reinterpretations of the power and truth complex to which a society is subject. (Announcement Schauspielhaus Hamburg)

Suddently, everything is very different from last winter; no one appears abruptly under the window and starts whistling in Central European Time. Nobody comes inside anymore, as they always did, in big shoes and with secret kisses in the early evening when the light is slowly turning blue.
What remains from this winter is the smell of coffee. And the memories of stories about foreign words, about beacons and colours, about international flag signals, about water resources and lengths of measure from distant lands. What remains is the yardstick, and measuring things in centimetres: the distance between your shoes when you’ve taken them off; the length of a winter coat’s arms; the distance of the kettle from the hob. What remains is the view out the window, even if no one is looking up, MEZ, an electric wire over the street, a lamp above the median strip, little balconies across the way, curtains. And a little metal pipe in your pocket when you rummage around for it.
An implied story, an aborted story. The memory releases the breath that puts the words of this “monologue for a woman” into circulation this final winter. The language distils snapshots of a shared past, reduced, enlarged, the picture that she wanted to preserve in her memory keeps moving further away into new experimental arrangements.

Based in a run-down high-rise somewhere in contemporary Germany, Arabian Night takes us into the lives, dreams and fantasies of five unique individuals on one enchanted summer's evening. Hans, the inquisitive caretaker, can't work out why the water has run dry above floor eight; he's gone to investigate - Fatima, the sensitive lodger, anxiously awaits her lover, Kalil, who is mysteriously trapped between floors in an elevator - Franziska, the dreamy amnesiac, falls asleep each night and forgets her day every day - And Peter, the romantic voyeur, trespasses through unlocked doors least of all expecting what he finds - All of their lives cross on this fateful humid night: an Arabian Night for the modern age.

„An old woman stands in her bathroom. By accident she saw herself naked in the mirror today, she tells us. Normally she makes sure that she dresses in the dark. And then, with great indifference, her comment: ‘disgusting’. Such moments of illusion and desillusion is what the play BEFORE / AFTER is about which the author and dramaturg Roland Schimmelpfennig wrote for the festival Frankfurter Positionen (financed by the BHF-Bank-Stiftung) and which now received its first staged reading at the TAT (Theater am Turm, Frankfurt).
At first sight the scenes seem to follow each other without any connection between them. The protagonists seem caught up in their loneliness and sadness. The older ones look back at their lives, the younger ones hide from reality or despair of it. Couples seem to know deep down that men and women don’t belong together, and still they delay the separation from their partners for as long as possible. Melancholy pervades the images…
After a while, the spectator begins to take up traces and to follow them. There is, for instance, the young woman who cheats on her boyfried for the first time after eleven years. It is her sudden interest in a book about Matthias Grünewald which betrays her…” (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung)

An old man and a women in her mid-thirties: Joseph and Ruby, an odd couple. They are friends, but maybe it’s just a friendship born of necessity: both of them are unemployed and neither is going back on the market. So they occupy themselves as best they can; they are not hunters, but they become collectors instead. They collect images: they collect pairs of dead animals that they have seen on television, names of lipsticks that they were offered in the shopping centre, images from the television as well as pictures from the consumer world, memories, words and time.
RUBY: Someone’s head is smashed in with an iron bar. Someone is shot from behind, someone falls from the roof of a skyscraper after losing a battle, he falls countless floors into the deep, one man has a bullet go into his forehead, into the back of his head, into his chest, into his skin, sometimes the bullet smashes the base of the skull just below the ear.
A metal rod bores through a man around forty through the hydraulic trick of his opponent, he is impaled; women are strangled with stockings, towels or threads of steel nearly as thin as hair that cut deep into the skin; a man around thirty gets blown up by explosives, a bomb, a contact mine, and flies high into the air.

A man enters a room, a hall, an atrium, a hanger. Or something like an underground field, an acre beneath the earth. The man is here to ask a corpse about the future: Tiresias. Who wouldn’t want to be able to see into the future? And who wouldn’t want, just once, to be able to speak with the dead? Tell me what it was like, what it was really like back then. An encounter with those whose time has passed.
But who says that the advise here isn’t completely confused? Perhaps a dead man’s vision of the future is nothing more than the confused reconstruction of a lost past. In order to understand their death, the dead celebrate life. Every recovered moment is precious. It was nice back then, one of them says. When were we really alive, really really alive?
When I was walking down the street with you, hand in hand, hopelessly in love.
Let’s dance.
These shadows of the underworld experience the most important moments in their life over and over again – but which moments are important, which unimportant? Who should decide that at the end of a life? Odysseus needs the dead seer Tiresias to look into the future, but the dead need Odysseus to explain their past. They try desperately to give meaning to their past.
Odysseus himself cannot answer, because for him, too, looking back at the time lost in the war and forward at the dangers before him, meaning has been lost. He is gasping for air. Where to start from here? But gathering here were countless hoards of ghosts with terrible shrieks, and pale horror seized me. (Roland Schimmelpfennig)

Homer’s ODYSSEY is the earliest great European epic poem about a colonisation and its consequences (…) The ten-year odyssey of the mythical hero Ulysses who won the war against Troy through his cunning and then drifted across the Mediterranean to get back to his hometown of Ithaca shows how a war in foreign parts can turn colonisers into nomads and migrants themselves. Ulysses has grown a stranger to himself, his home island and to his wife Penelope, and he returns as a stranger – but where to? (…) Penelope makes love to a teacher in his small car, the teacher tells the ever new history of Ulysses until the latter finally returns to Ithaca. On the way there, Ulysses and his companions ask themselves what home actually is and whether one has a fundamental right to it. They encounter the cyclop who wants to destroy the invaders, others take them in and party with them, but the short rush of welcome is quickly over. (Announcement Staatsschauspiel Dresden)

Schnitzler's Reigen depicts the hypocritical sexual morals of a late century, showing what should not be shown. Only to be banned from being shown on stages for a long time. But that is long past, we live in a liberal and tolerant society. "Anything goes" has freed people of the 21st century from all constraints.
Has it not? Are we still driven by a power that is not an external dictate but an inner one? What brings us together, drives two people for a short moment, for the length of one scene, into the arms of the other? To find what there? Comfort, confidence, power, freedom? Is there even love in the end, when love is made? In Roland Schimmelpfennig's treatment of the round dance, the figures become entangled in each other and take turns, and they all seem dangerously familiar. Sometimes they offer comfort, sometimes they give themselves, they are cynics, power-hungry and vulnerable. Victims and perpetrators - and sometimes both at the same time. It is an eternal dance. Only the music is different.

"It is striking how often Schimmelpfennig quotes war metaphors, how he draws disturbing pictures in which he reveals the sexual connotation of violence and destruction, playing with the seductive fascination of crossing borders. (...) Schimmelpfennig exposes male sexual fantasies and tells of men's fear of losing control. He describes clear situations of abuse of power and sexualised violence against women. But he also shows the ethical grey areas and their emotional ambivalences. (Ingoh Brux on Siebzehn Szenen aus der Dunkelheit in Theater heute Yearbook 2020)

In Thebes, after the end of Pentheus and the seizure of power by Labdakos, another grandson of Kadmos, a period full of violent excesses begins. Finally, Laios, the son of Labdakos, is brought back from exile and enthroned. But he does not come alone, the young Chrysippus from Pisa accompanies him. Is he the reason for the childlessness of the new royal couple Laios and Iokaste or is it the oracle of the seer Pythia? The next creature appears at the gates of the city: the Sphinx, an animal creature made up of a lion, a woman and a bird, which drives the city into murderous madness with its singing and chattering. In a highly poetic and multi-perspective monologue that gives voice to the various characters and myths about Oedipus' father, the production explores the question of what could have motivated the couple Laios and Iocaste to father an offspring despite the religious prohibition. How much responsibility do the parents bear for the fate of their child Oedipus, whom they wanted to make disappear in the mountains immediately after birth? How much guilt is passed on from generation to generation and how much freedom does the individual have to free themselves from it? (Announcement Deutsches Schauspielhaus)

Everyone wants to get to the executive suite. Everyone wants the Delhi job. Everyone wants sex, everyone wants love. So, they push for it. Push Up is set in a world we all know: the world of work.

A pub, not long before closing time. Ten people sitting, drinking and talking. It’s not a club, not a birthday party, and it’s no work party. But they stay until morning even though they can’t actually stand one another. They are not the marginalised, not the financially unsuccessful. They are married, have jobs, pensions, and some of them even have children. They drink – not to forget, but because they can afford to. They are the pillars of society, they are the economic miracle generation, or at least its spiritual heritage, those who know the Republic and who move about in it comfortably, even when everything else is at a standstill.
“What is there to complain about in the upturn?” one of them says, and actually means: “It’s not going badly for us at all.” That it could take its revenge, thinks another foggily, but, as quickly as it entered his head, the thought is swilled down again. And so they sit like a council of gods and make the pub Olympus, until they could fly like Icarus.
The speaker is always right, and so they speak, are funny and vulgar, they yell, belch, squawk, and sometimes sing heartrendingly. Right at the end, when the last glass has been emptied, there is even a flash of something like love. But it’s too late: even Amor and Eros drowned in alcohol long ago. For, as the angelic waitress knows, who despite her insight can’t save the drinkers: “That is of course the bad thing about the gastronomy business: we have to live from poisoning those who are so dear to our hearts!” (Announcement Schauspiel Essen)

In the last part of the Trilogie der Tiere (Trilogy of Animals), time and place are suspended, the dead wake up next to the living, and the differences between them are barely discernible. People cling to the past, the future seems bleak and the weight too heavy, every bottle of beer is tainted by memory. They have no strength to clean up. Young girls crave satisfaction, as virgins they dig their own graves. The characters of the previous plays form a band of the failed. They wander about helplessly, lost in a world that has forgotten them: Peter and Isabel, Frankie, the lovers of a previous life, the lost, and those who now talk to birds. They act without joy or hope. Dreams don’t exist any more. Life is mostly over. Darkness sheds no light, yet it is hope that dies last. All endings contain a beginning: “There is a glowing mouse here. The mouse is bald, it has no fur, no hair. It glows in the dark, you can see it with your bare eyes.”
“So far, so complicated. Every-day logic disdainfully bids adieu, because it has no business here. And yet: the 80 minutes of the production are the purest pleasure, fascinating and touching at the same time.” (Die Welt)

A sunny morning in September. A father is on the way to the park with his son. The dog is on the leash, petrol and a knife are in his backpack. For God has commanded that he kill his own son. And while the city slowly awakens, the mother hopes that the story will perhaps change if she only tells it often enough: The story of Abraham’s and Isaac’s nameless revenants on a cloudless morning in the park.
Roland Schimmelpfennig wrote Hier bin ich (Here I am) for the Holland House in Copenhagen, where it had its world premiere under the title Frygt og Bæven, on the occasion of Søren Kierkegaard’s 250th birthday.

Forty-two years they have been waiting for the package from overseas, and it is such a disappointment: a cheap ball-point pen; a ten-year-old pocket calendar; a blonde wig; tiny sample packets of detergent; and no letter – instead, an empty mustard jar wrapped in an old newspaper in a language that no one understands. And a spoon. As if they didn’t have any spoons in Cuba. But then they discover an announcement in the paper, and miracles come on after another.

They all live in the skyscrapers of the suburbs. The "Chinese", too, who sells fruit and vegetables in his small shop. And who knows how to tell a story about each fruit. And who falls in love with the beautiful Olga. And because she also falls in love with him, the two become a couple. Although they aren't a match at all. The whole neighborhood thinks so. Because she is so young. And he is so old. She would be a better match with the "Lebanese". He works in the hardware store and is young and strong and knows the way to the roof. She also falls in love with him. She just wants to have everything at the same time. When the circus Navara comes to town and unhinges the world for a short moment, she actually gets everything at once, but in a different way than she expected. All of a sudden, the old poet finds himself in the body of the Lebanese, while the vigorous young man has to cope with the body of the Chinese...

In an isolated jungle - sometime in the future - a unit of eight men and women fight an unknown enemy. It is a war that has gone on so long no-one can remember why it started or imagine how it can end. Soldiers have lost touch with reality, glass-eating aliens have infiltrated their ranks, and unit Delta Zero's massacre replays itself night after night in the same dark clearing. Blowing apart the idea of war as entertainment, this amoral epic is a provocative work from one of Germany's most celebrated contemporary playwrights.

A summer evening. In a house by a lake. The parlour. On the stage, a group of people in dripping-wet summer clothes and shoes. MARION, an affluent woman in her late fifties, her somewhat younger partner GUNTER, Marion’s son from her first marriage CHRISTIAN, early to mid twenties, and her guests, the couple ERICH and SUSANNE, both doctors in their fifties or a little younger, and their daughter, TANJA, a similar age to CHRISTIAN.
MARION Wet – soaking wet. What a bummer!
A short pause.
What a bummer!
GUNTER I can’t do anything –
MARION Yes you can! Take it off, we have to take it off.
Disgusting!

From the very beginning, themes such as guilt, neglect, regret and failure to give in played a role in my thoughts about the play. Great themes for the stage, as tragic as they are comic. The play, as far as I dare say at this early stage, is the sketch of bourgeois life and bourgeois derailment. Today. A house by a lake. A summer evening… A night-time boat trip was planned, but there’s something wrong with the boat, it will sink later or at least fill up with water. That might be the beginning of the play: everyone is soaking wet.
No complaints, no laments, little reflection, no Ibsen. No living-room fight. Rather, a fragmented play that is fast, complex, sometimes ‘well built’, sometimes concentrated on what is absolutely essential, a play that nevertheless focuses on the characters and their situation. A nervous atmosphere. High tempo. Massive damages. Possible working title: The Leak. (Roland Schimmelpfennig, 8 December 2006)

Euripides' The Bacchae, written in exile in 406 BC, is one of the greatest and most enigmatic tragedies of antiquity. Dionysus, god of intoxication, ecstasy and fertility, descends upon the Greek city of Thebes. But Pentheus, king of Thebes, refuses to recognise Dionysus as the son of Zeus and therefore as a god. In a seemingly hopeless battle, Pentheus rebels against the cult of Dionysus and is punished in the most horrific way, for gods are not merciful. Two irreconcilable principles clash: rational, cool, questioning thinking and calculating state interests on the one hand, and the demand for unconditional faith on the other. Two extreme positions struggle for social supremacy. Ultimately, Dionysus, who brooks no contradiction, allows his followers, the Bacchae, to take revenge on the king. For the omnipotence of the gods must not be questioned. It is humans who suffer the consequences – the victims, but also the perpetrators once their frenzy has subsided. The anti-civilisational barbarism of the Bacchae seems more relevant today than ever, for it remains uncertain whether Europe, sadly reminiscent of the principles of the Enlightenment, will win the ideological struggle against the self-appointed avengers of God. Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of the most relevant contemporary playwrights, has taken on this cruel tragedy and written a precise, unadorned and all the more merciless new translation, which will be premiered by Robert Borgmann, who has been invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen for the second time in a row in 2015. (Announcement Theater Basel)

He runs into her on the street in the evening after work, it’s already dark and it’s raining. She starts crying suddenly, and he asks her if he can help her; after all, they know each other from way back – even if they haven’t had anything to do with each other for a long time.
Friends from way back – and back then, nothing mattered: background, money, school, parents. Religion. Skin colour. They got drunk together at night at the bus stop. They had the same tattoos. And then: studying classical languages. Studying history. Getting married, having kids.
Or looking for work without finding it. Today one of them is a head mistress, the other sells cars, and one sits at the checkout in a supermarket. The city is pretty big, but sometimes you do cross paths. It’s been a long time.
You look good.
Do you think so? I don’t.
It’s raining, and he takes the crying woman to her apartment, it’s still the old apartment, the apartment that her parents lived in. A corridor painted green. Poor people.
And later, his wife asks him: Is everything ok? Yes, he tells her, but from this day on, nothing is ok anymore, nothing.

Grazing cattle, a brook, a little wooden bridge. On each side lies a village. Each village has a church – but one bell chimes a little later than the other. This eventually leads to an argument between the villagers. The winemaker beats the cattle farmer back over the bridge to get him out of his sight. That evening, the stream seems wider than usual. Years go by. While things get better and better for one side, for the others they are getting worse and worse. In the meantime, the brook has turned into a river, and the chimes of the bell have got further apart. Then a fire breaks out on one side. The other side wants to help, but for a long time now there hasn’t been a bridge any more.

"A party or a vernissage, maybe the opening of a pub - or is it just a party at somebody's house? Maybe it's someone's birthday or someone has passed an exam? It's cramped in here, too crowded, way too crowded, you can hardly get through the hallway, you can hardly get into the kitchen, someone has a cough, someone says I haven't gotten rid of this cold for weeks, someone gives a speech, someone smiles at someone secretly, two kiss for the last time, two kiss for the first time, someone waits for a call, someone cries, someone laughs, someone sings a song, everyone sings a song. It will be light soon. Already? Indeed, the sun is rising. Yes? No? And suddenly everything is different. It's as if a shadow has slid in front of the sun." Roland Schimmelpfennig

Roland Schimmelpfennig, one of the most renowned German-speaking contemporary playwrights, describes loose encounters, casual gestures and fragments of conversation of his panorama of figures in precise, poetically condensed miniatures and snapshots and sketches the kaleidoscopic image of a society that suddenly comes to a standstill due to a pandemic. Through clever leaps in time, striking breaks and cleverly constructed transitions, we follow the most diverse figures after this shock into a disparate and dissonant time of social isolation, helplessness, fear and despair. We accompany them in their desperate attempt to create a cartography of the crisis, despite the fact that there are still a lack of interpretation routines and inevitable misjudgements.