Euripides, Roland Schimmelpfennig

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)