House of Trouble – Das famose Leben der Geizigen

In the organizer's words:

The stage actor, playwright and drama director Molière is threatened with a fiasco and public disgrace: two hours before the curtain is due to go up, the actors in his company are unable to perform their lines, instead moaning and complaining about their roles and criticizing his new play. The king had only commissioned the play a week earlier, demanding the impossible: a comedy made to order, art as a convenient commodity, easily digestible and strictly on schedule...

For his first work at the BADISCHEN STAATSTHEATER, director and actor Milan Peschel takes Molière's play-within-a-play The Prelude at Versailles as a starting scenario and, together with the acting ensemble, develops a furiously entertaining potpourri from Molière's wide-ranging comedy repertoire, other clever texts and references from pop culture.

So the king has ordered a new comedy and the players don't know their roles, don't know what they are supposed to play and just playing around is easier said than done. Sure, each and every one of the illustrious troupe could pull Harpagon, Alceste, Argan or Monsieur Jourdain out of their mothballs and deliver a performance the likes of which Paris has never seen before. But being able to is not the same as wanting to, comedians are not service providers and nobody has to go to the House of Trouble for a make-a-wish concert. After all, drama thrives on discourse, the will to engage with society and the present and on scandal. Just like recently at the premiere of Tartuffe or before that at Die Kritik der "Schule der Frauen" or even before that at Die lächerlichen Preziösen. Oh, how the priests raved, the doctors and lawyers - all the powerful people - looked horrified and outraged in the mirror of their own stupidity, feeling exposed and exposed. Yes, that's how it was back then, in the days of Molière.

But what does contemporary theater stand for? What will theater stand for in the future? Entertainment, emotions, the desire to play, controversy and discourse? Or for a museum-like cultivation of canon and consensus, an exclusive stage for the bourgeois show? Ultimately, the question is: House of Trouble or House of no Trouble, that is the question here. And everything else is just theater, but definitely great theatrical fun in the spirit of Molière.