Herr Puntila und sein Knecht Matti

In the organizer's words:

by Bertolt Brecht
Folk play based on stories and a play design by Hella Wuolijoki
with music by Paul Dessau and Jörg Gollasch
Director: Karin Beier

"Dear audience, the time is dreary / Wise, who is worried, and stupid, who is carefree! / But he is not out of the woods who no longer laughs / Therefore we have made a comic play."

Bertolt Brecht sits cut off from the world on a country estate in exile in Finland. For a drama competition, he reworked a draft of a folk play by his host Hella Wuolijoki. The jury was unsuccessful, but after the end of the Second World War, this portrait of a morally and economically indebted society, in which the power relations are as unbearable as they are indissoluble, became one of Brecht's most frequently performed plays alongside the "Threepenny Opera".

The landowner Puntila never misses an opportunity to indulge in alcohol. His thirst is incessant. Drunk, he appears sociable and empathetic, makes promises, parades his moral conscience, sees himself as a victim of his role, and appeals to his subordinates for understanding of his ownership and the power that results from it. How he would like to be someone else. How he would like to behave humanely, to be like Matti, his chauffeur, to whom he does not grant any rights when he is sober - especially as he is a "Red", an imminent danger, someone who could organize and emancipate himself against his master. Puntila knows this, especially in those moments when his thirst subsides. Sobered up, he turns into a cold, calculating man of men, for whom everything becomes a business, even relationships, even his own daughter. But his time is coming to an end. He senses this at every moment.

Even though Puntila may seem like an antediluvian beast, he appears surprisingly familiar. It is worth looking into history, writes Brecht, "because the deposits of bygone eras remain in people's souls for a long time to come." Figures from this bygone era reappear like ghosts, ghosts of a world-historical duel that was thought to be over, ghosts that remind us that the monstrous inequality in the world cannot be sustained in the long term.

With: Jan-Peter Kampwirth, Joachim Meyerhoff, Josef Ostendorf, Maximilian Scheidt, Lilith Stangenberg, Kriston van Boven and Michael Wittenborn

Live music: Vlatko Kučan and Jakob Neubauer

Director: Karin Beier
Stage: Johannes Schütz
Costumes: Wicke Naujoks
Music: Jörg Gollasch
Choreographic collaboration: Valenti Rocamora i Tora
Video: Severin Renke Severin Renke
Lighting: Annette ter Meulen
Dramaturgy: Judith Gerstenberg

Further information: Mr. Puntila and his servant Matti | Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg