The Munich Volkstheater presented the program for "Radikal Jung".
The directors' festival will be opened on April 27, 2023 by the Burgtheater in Vienna.
Of course, numbers say nothing about the quality of art.
And yet they document that a lot is currently being done very correctly at the Munich Volkstheater.
The stage has come through the pandemic well;
in January, the house in the Schlachthofviertel even had an occupancy rate of a strong 96 percent, as cultural advisor Anton Biebl remarked, smiling about the “communist values”.
A crooked joke meant to show respect.
Then Biebl praises the utilization of "Radikal Jung" last year - 75 percent of the places at the directors' festival were occupied.
However, Christian Stückl does not want to accept this compliment.
"That was a corona number," says the director of the Volkstheater.
"We will be better."
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The second opening premiere is the performance "Radical Hope - Eye to Eye" from Antwerp.
© Nathan Isharv
The self-confidence is justified, as becomes clear when the program for this year is presented.
The festival will be extremely diverse: in terms of content and aesthetics.
The four-strong jury viewed between 70 and 80 productions by young directors.
She invited 13 of them to Munich, where the festival will take place between April 27th and May 5th.
The productions come from Antwerp, Berlin, Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Hamburg, Magdeburg, Mannheim, Innsbruck, Vienna and Weimar - the host is represented in the program with "8½ Million" based on the novel by Tom McCarthy (see box).
Radikal Jung runs from April 27th to May 5th, 2023
After Corona, it became more difficult for the theater makers of tomorrow, reports festival director Jens Hillje, because their works are rarely shown on the big stages.
During their research, he and his jury colleagues Christine Wahl, C. Bernd Sucher and Florian Fischer found that many young directors are now daring to “break out of the echo chambers” – coupled with “turning to larger subjects in order to get away from the to tell society as a whole".
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Completes the first day of "Radikal Jung": "Sistas!" from Berlin based on Chekhov's "Three Sisters".
© Kamil Janus
This can be experienced, for example, in the Düsseldorf "Odyssey": The Ukrainian playwright Pavlo Arie wrote Homer's epic over and brought Penelope into the centre, who has been waiting ten years for the end of the war and the return of her husband Odysseus.
Seven women and two boys from the country attacked by Russia will also be on stage that evening.
Jan Friedrich's "Woyzeck" after Büchner also poses an important question: the relationship between life and work.
The Theater Magdeburg reports on a man who breaks under the economic conditions.
Meanwhile, the Institute for Media, Politics & Theater is looking to the future with "Gondola Stories": Based on Ischgl's embarrassing role in the outbreak of Corona, the focus is on the Alpine region (and thus skiing) in times of climate change.
"I'm really excited
what comes out,” says Stückl, looking at the 13 invited productions.
And he's not alone in that.