Tips for the 2024 / 25 theater season
Autumn in Berlin not only brings colorful leaves, but also an exciting new season on the city's stages. Theater lovers can look forward to a variety of premieres and classics that stand out this season. Whether contemporary dramas, innovative productions or modern classics - here you can find out which plays you shouldn't miss in the new Berlin season. Discover the highlights that will light up the capital's stages! ✨
Premieres for the Berlin 2024 / 25 theater season
Don't stress if you've missed a premiere: You can find all the dates on our website.
Los días afuera / The Days Out There
Los días afuera / The Days Out There is a musical, variety show, documentary and theater. A group of cis and trans women who were imprisoned in various Argentinian prisons act out scenes from their past years. The real lives of the protagonists become fiction, in which their biographies interweave from the moment of their release: Nacho becomes a cab driver, Paula starts working in an illegal textile workshop, Noelia becomes a sex worker again and campaigns for the rights of trans women. Theater, dance and singing become instruments that help them to make a future for themselves. But that future - as is the way with the future - remains uncertain. Lola Arias, winner of the prestigious International Ibsen Prize 2024, moves between voguing and cumbia melodies in Los días afuera / The Days Out There - an ode to freedom.
Kleiner Mann - was nun?
The young parents Pinneberg and Lämmchen hold on to their love and belief in bourgeois morality - despite poverty, unemployment and social hardship. Their struggle for a last vestige of dignity ends on the outskirts of Berlin. Hans Fallada summarizes his internationally successful novel, which he could only publish censored in 1932 in times of extreme economic and political tension in Germany, as follows: "Marriage and woe of Johannes Pinneberg, clerk, loses his job, gets a job, becomes unemployed for good. One of six million, a nothing, and what the nothing feels, thinks and experiences." The question "What now?" was historically answered by the National Socialists' seizure of power. Fallada answers the question of how effective humanity can be in a mass society with a utopian moment.Frank Castorf adapts the original version of the novel for the Berliner Ensemble and relates it to autobiographical texts by Fallada, most of which he wrote in prison, such as "Sachlicher Bericht über das Glück, ein Morphinist zu sein".
"The Hunger" von Constanza Macras | Dorky Park in der Volksbühne in Berlin
The Hunger explores excess. Inspired by the historical events fictionalized in the novel The Stranger Witness by Argentinian writer Juan José Saer, The Hunger follows the experiences of European colonizers in the Rio de la Plata region of South America in the early 16th century, when an indigenous group raids Spanish colonizers in the north of present-day Argentina. There is only one survivor, who joins the tribal society of the Colastiné. Much later, he is liberated by the Spaniards and testifies, reflects and remembers his perceptions.
Das Schiff der Träume [fährt einfach weiter]
![Das Schiff der Träume [fährt einfach weiter]](https://imageflow.rausgegangen.de/url/https%3A//www.berlin-buehnen.de/media/productions/das-schiff-traeume-faehrt-einfach-weiter/gallery/202410262215180483.jpg?width=1000&height=750&mode=crop)
The diva is dead! In her will, she has decreed that her ashes are to be scattered in the middle of the sea on the island where she was born. On the eve of the First World War, a bourgeois community of mourners sets off on the luxury steamer Gloria N. to pay their last respects to the best opera singer of all time. On board is the crème de la crème of the opera world. The expedition becomes an odyssey through the open sea with an uncertain outcome. Fellini's visually stunning masterpiece The Ship of Dreams turns grotesque when a competition between singers takes place in the sweltering boiler room in front of the sweating working class, a blind princess can see the colors of music, the spirit of Edmea Tetua is summoned from the world of the dead, a chicken is hypnotized by a Russian bass-baritone in the kitchen and Italian opera arias are sung to reconcile classes and cultures. Fellini's cinematic parable is a funeral oratorio for the diva, whose return is longed for in a world marked by capitalism, globalization, war and a decline in values.
Blue Skies
What if the end is closer than we want to admit? Cat and Todd lead a comfortable life, they own a great beach house in Florida, and as a representative for a large rum company, Todd gets around well and earns enough money with parties where a lot of alcohol is drunk for advertising purposes to enable Cat to lead a carefree life, even as a less successful influencer. If only it weren't for the rising sea levels and the increasingly frequent storm surges, which cause the Tesla to develop ugly rust spots on the driveway. Cat is regularly reminded that things can't go on like this by her brother Cooper, who, as an entomologist in California, is noticeably running out of things to research. In the end, two royal pythons in Cat's beach house also play their part in the looming catastrophe, and the inevitable apocalypse is no longer irrevocable. T.C. Boyle tells of the division of a society between naïve carry-on and apocalyptic shock paralysis based on a family divided by a rift on the east and west coasts of America. Alexander Eisenach transfers the novel to the stage - albeit without any live snakes.
Pick me Girls
"I'm not like other women" is the typical sentence of a pick me girl. Most women have probably thought this at some point. Not only as an exorbitant overestimation of their own individuality, but also as a belittling of their own self: not as beautiful, not as thin. As a woman in particular, you are confronted with being judged from an early age: The male gaze, being desired, is the most important currency of all. If attention and recognition from men is the highest good for a woman, then she is often declared a pick me girl. In her very personal essay "Pick me Girls", which she presents on stage together with director Christina Tscharyiski, Sophie Passmann talks about this very male gaze and how it has shaped her, about the ideals and images she grew up with and about the "woman I would actually have become. "Sophie Passmann, born in 1994, is an author and presenter. She has written books such as "Alte weiße Männer" and "Komplett Gänsehaut", which, like "Pick me Girls", became bestsellers, and also writes for the feature section of DIE ZEIT. Sophie Passmann is making her theater debut at the Berliner Ensemble with "Pick me Girls".
Glaube, Geld, Krieg und Liebe
Robert Lepage is developing a new play with players from the Schaubühne ensemble. At the beginning of rehearsals, there was no text, no story, no characters, just one object: a deck of cards. He assigns the four suits of hearts, clubs, spades and diamonds to love, faith, war and money. From the cards, their suit families, figures and numbers, he improvised entire worlds, a wide variety of characters and four interwoven storylines spanning eight decades of German history. They tell of love, the search for happiness and temptation by the devil, of hope, fate and trauma. Wars always mark a caesura, an end and the new beginning of another story: shortly after the Second World War, a baby is left in a nunnery and grows up there, only to leave the young Federal Republic for Paris when she has barely reached adulthood. When she has twins of her own, a tarot fortune teller predicts disaster and advises her to give the children away. Shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the supposed end of the Cold War, a West German couple spends Valentine's Day in Baden-Baden. Because smoking is allowed in the casino, the wife ends up there, where she discovers gambling for herself and gambles away her family's ill-fated inheritance. A soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder tells his therapist how he lost his most loyal comrade during a mission in Afghanistan - a service dog, his closest companion and yet, from the military's point of view, only part of the equipment in an emergency. And shortly before the outbreak of the Russian war of aggression in the Ukraine, a gay couple want to fulfill their wish to have a child with a surrogate mother. Robert Lepage was born in 1957 in Québec, where he still lives today. With productions for theater, opera, circus and film, he has been one of the world's most important contemporary storytellers and theater makers for more than three decades. In 2022, FIND dedicated a focus to him and showed the legendary production "The Seven Streams of the River Ota" and his highly acclaimed solo "887". With "Faith, Money, War and Love", he is developing and staging a work with the Schaubühne ensemble for the first time.
You can find more great plays here!