LAIOS
Roland Schimmelpfennig’s polymorphic text seems to invite us into a game that is at times serious, at times trashy. A game of ideas, attitudes, and different ways of interpreting the biography of the famous corpse Laius, in the context of our contemporary needs for freedom, belonging, equal rights, and security. Do we truly live in an age of reason, or is there still room for destiny? Can we even answer these questions, given that we are nothing more than slaves to the spirit of the modern age? We use the space of the Atelier hall to let these tensions unfold: “Outside,” in the courtyard, the irrational still reigns, while “Inside,” in the hall, the actors will attempt to find answers to the above questions with the help of the audience.
LIEBE / LOVE
Recently settled in Germany, the writer Olivia and the ever-in-the-making director Popeye meet at a German language course and begin what seems to be a fairly ordinary love affair. Despite the language barrier and the ten-year age difference between them—he being the younger one—the lovers go on dates, move in together, and build a life side by side. However, in their seemingly uncomplicated and conventional story, problems begin to surface—problems that only one of them appears to notice. LOVE / An Argumentative Exercise invites us to peer almost secretly, as if through a window, into the couple’s life of Olivia and Popeye, characters shaped after the beloved animated archetypes. Through an ironic analysis of patriarchal structures, the status of the artist, and a deep dive into Olivia’s inner world, playwright Sivan Ben Yishai’s text explores how people who appear rationally aware of these social structures can nonetheless fall, in their personal lives, into the very patterns they publicly criticize.
DOSENFLEISCH / CANNED MEAT
One evening, Rolf, a motor insurance inspector, stops at a gas station on the side of the highway. From there, he can observe the stretch of road where an unusually high number of accidents have been occurring lately. To his dismay, the nosy gas station clerk, Beate, keeps approaching him, rambling on with bizarre remarks.Trying to avoid her, he meets Jayne, an actress wandering through the same rest stop. Fascinated by her, Rolf cannot shake the feeling that he knows her from somewhere. As he struggles to sort out his thoughts, strange things begin to happen at the station, and the atmosphere grows increasingly ominous. dosenfleisch is Ferdinand Schmalz’s second play and was invited to the Mülheim Theatre Days in 2016. It is an unconventional detective story in which the playwright tackles themes such as the ecological and social impact of infrastructure development and the impersonal relationships between people in a perpetually hurried world. These themes are explored both in the characters’ reflective monologues and in the epic passages of the long-haul truck driver, the character who partially narrates the action.
DIE POLITIKER / THE POLITICIANS
In this text, which resists classification within a single literary genre—hovering at the boundary between the lyrical and the dramatic—Wolfram Lotz deconstructs the term “politicians” through exaggerated repetition, pushing it to a level of comic and even irritating absurdity. The work is based on a long-term project of the author, who in 2018 set out to write a “total diary” that would document his life continuously and in detail. A year later, overwhelmed by doubts about the justification of publishing such deeply personal scenes, he deleted the document and, in 2022, wrote the novel Holy Scripture I, drawing on that diary. The Politicians, however, became a dramatic poem in which Lotz combines philosophical reflections, metaliterary passages, and jokes in a playful poetic form.
