Gespenster

+ introduction from 5 pm

A country estate on a Norwegian fjord. Young Osvald Alving returns from Paris to his parents' remote home. At his mother Helene's request, a children's home is to be opened there - as a memorial to his deceased father. But appearances are deceptive: his son's return brings to light a past that has been hidden for years behind the bourgeois and respectable façade. Conventions are shaken, life's lies are exposed. And suddenly everything is in flames. What was meant to be a celebratory new beginning turns into the conjuring of ghosts.

A family drama with a haunting and frighteningly contemporary look at the question: What do we really inherit - our wealth? Or our guilt?

In GESPENSTER, Henrik Ibsen mercilessly exposes the double standards of a society in which silence destroys more than any open word. The modern translation uses particularly clear language and radical consistency. The first performance took place in Chicago in 1882, as topics such as incest, free love and euthanasia broke too many taboos for Norwegian society. The first public performance in Germany followed five years later at the Residenztheater Berlin in the presence of Theodor Fontane and Gerhart Hauptmann, as well as Ibsen himself, according to Helmut Rühle in his "Biography of German Theater", the birth of modern theater.