Don Quijote

In the organizer's words:

Director Kieran Joel | Set design Leonie Falke and Laura Kirst | Music Lenny Mockridge | Assistant director Lisa Anetsmann
With Leonie Houber and Felix Witzlau Premiere: 25.11.2017 | Awarded the Cologne Theater Prize 2018 |

Leonie Houber takes over the role of Max Themak in September 2022.

Since its first publication in 1605 and 1615, Cervantes' two-part mammoth novel has been an indispensable text of modernity, with each generation formulating new questions. This is only possible because Don Quixote of La Mancha is about a problem that never gets old: people's need for stories and their willingness to be enchanted by imaginary worlds. However, Cervantes not only addresses the deceptive potential of art through the dream world of his protagonist, in which windmills can become evil giants, but he also attacks the fiction of his own novel, whose most avid readers include Don Quixote and Sancho Panza himself. Based on a classic text that addresses the attractiveness and necessity of illusions for life like no other, our "Knight of the Sad Countenance" will take the question to the Bauturm as to which fantasies and improbabilities we willingly adhere to today - and what very special part the millennia-old miracle machinery of the theater has in these processes.

With a new cast - Leonie Houber now takes on the role of Sancho Panza - the adaptation of the novel becomes a fantastic adventure playground where chivalry can be simultaneously asserted and dismantled.