Anne-Marie die Schönheit

"I had a happy life, you know. I didn't have a movie face." Anne-Marie was never really a grande dame of the theater. And not really a beauty either. The big acting career just didn't come her way. She barely made it from the dreary provinces to a suburban theater in Paris. And while her colleague Gigi played the big roles in the cinema, was idolized by celebrity lovers and was surrounded by a host of enchanting grandchildren, Anne-Marie was left with her dull husband and what she considers to be a wayward son. But while Gigi has already passed away, Anne-Marie lives on, stoically enduring the challenges of ageing and her loneliness. Instead of dancing on stage, she now only occasionally hobbles to the nearest supermarket with knee problems and nibbles on truffled cashews. "They say the happiest lives are the ones where nothing much happens . . ."

A tenderly melancholy and unsentimental look back at a life between stage and reality, wishful thinking and dashed hopes, illusion and bitterness. And a tribute to the power of the theater.

Yasmina Reza (DER GOTT DES GEMETZELS, "KUNST") always succeeds in looking into the soul movement of the disappointed with a fine feeling for the small and large catastrophes of everyday life, without exaggeration or sensationalism. She consistently questions a person's identity: She wrote ANNE-MARIE DIE SCHÖNHEIT explicitly for a man. The world premiere in Paris was performed by André Marcon, the German-language premiere by Robert Hunger-Bühler. Meinhard Zanger bids farewell to the WBT after 18 years as artistic director with a poetic retrospective of an artist's life. In 2024, he was nominated for the German theater Oscar DER FAUST in the acting category for this role.