Bunbury. Ernst sein is everything!

German by Claudia Bossard

In order to escape their social obligations and live out their secret wishes and desires - their true selves? - incognito, the two dandies Algernon and Jack lead a double life. Algernon invents a sickly friend named Bunbury, who must be visited regularly in the country, while Jack pretends to take care of his easygoing brother Ernst so that he can travel to the city as often as possible. There, as Ernst, he leads a dissolute life, while at his country estate he sets the morally untouchable example for his ward Cecily. Cecily, like Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, whom Jack courts during his visits to the city, has set her mind on marrying only a man named Ernst. When Algernon shows up at the country estate in the role of Jack's supposed brother Ernst, the comic entanglements take their course.

Bunbury (in the original: The Importance of Being Earnest ) is Oscar Wilde's most famous comedy - and also his last: shortly after its premiere in 1895, he was sentenced to two years in the penitentiary with hard labor in the course of a public trial for homosexual acts. Ruined in health, financially and socially, the author died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde's own double life, which unlike that of his protagonists did not have a happy ending, inevitably inscribes itself in this perfectly constructed comedy from today's perspective.

In director Claudia Bossard's fast-paced version, Oscar Wilde's comedy, peppered with linguistic wit, becomes queer theatrical fun that not only liquefies the language barriers between German and English in metropolitan society talk, but also frees gender and identity images from their Victorian social corset in a playful whirlwind.