We could have turned back.

The production of Eure Paläste sind leer (Your Palaces Are Empty) marks the first time a play by award-winning Austrian dramatist Thomas Köck premieres at a Munich theatre. The only dramatist to win the important Mühlheimer Dramatikpreis twice in a row, in 2018 and 2019, Köck focuses on choric theatre, his dramas resemble musical compositions and are written as continuous texts without punctuation. Eure Paläste sind leer (all we ever wanted) is his first collaboration with director Jan-Christoph Gockel, and the beginning of a long-term relationship with the Münchner Kammerspiele.

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Artistic Director Barbara Mundel started her first season at the Kammerspiele a year ago, right in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic, when all theatres were closed. Productions were postponed or, if possible, streamed online. But finally, Mundel was able to present her first premiere to a live audience, a play based on Gabriele Tergit’s novel Effingers, in an adaptation by director Jan Bosse and dramaturge Viola Hasselberg. First published in 1951, the novel was not a success, but it was reissued this year and has been well received by literary critics.

Courtesy of Armin Smailovic.

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After Der Fall Meursault – Eine Gegendarstellung and The Assassin, Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani returns to the Kammerspiele with his own version of the Scottish play.

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Toshiki Okada is one of the most important Asian directors. No Sex is his third work for the Kammerspiele, it premiered on 14th April 2018. A stage director and author, Okada founded the theatre group chelfitsch in 1997, which had their first international success with 5 Days in March, a play about two young people fleeing to a love hotel to have sex for five days. His latest play deals with a group of young men who think that sex no longer matters.

Courtesy of Julian Baumann.

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In his comic triptych Hot Pepper, Air Conditioner and The Farewell Speech, the Japanese director and playwright Toshiki Okada examines office life in contemporary Japan and explores the relationship between temp workers and full-time workers in the declining Japanese economy.

Courtesy of Julian Baumann.

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Almost 100 years ago, on 29th September, 1922, the Münchner Kammerspiele presented the world premiere of Trommeln in der Nacht (Drums in the Night) – the first play by Bertolt Brecht that was ever put on stage. Little has remained of that remarkable evening except for a few photographs and director Christopher Rüping keeps wondering what the world premiere might have looked like. Determined to use theatre as a time machine, he decides to try and recapture the spirit of the original without turning his production into a museum piece. He starts off by copying the style of almost 100 years ago, reviving the cast of a bygone era, thereby reinventing the world premiere.

Courtesy of Julian Bauman.

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Accept. Enjoy. Merge. Glorify. Glorify. Glorify. (Timothy Leary). The Virgin Suicides was the 1993 debut novel by acclaimed American writer Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in a Detroit suburb during the 1970s, the fictional story centres on the lives of five teenage sisters who are raised by fanatical Catholic parents: Cecilia (13 years), Lux (14 years), Bonnie (15 years), Mary (16 years), and Therese (17 years). After the youngest girl makes an initial suicide attempt, her sisters are placed under close scrutiny by the parents, eventually being completely confined to their home. The girls seek to escape their imprisonment but their parents thwart their efforts and isolate them even more from the outside world, thereby destroying their dreams and suffocating their spirit. The girls all commit suicide within a year.

Courtesy of Judith Buss.

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Uisenma Borchu is a German-Mongolian film director, based in Munich. After several acclaimed documentaries such as Donne-moi plus (2007) and Himmel voller Geigen (2011), her feature film debut Schau mich nicht so an (Don’t Look at Me That Way) won the Bavarian Film Award in 2016.
Nachts, als die Sonne für mich schien (At Night, When the Sun was Shining for Me) is Uisenma Borchu’s first work for the theatre and the Kammerspiele present this world premiere at their studio space Kammer 3.

Courtesy of Josef Beyer.

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