MINETTI

In the organizer's words:

MINETTI

A portrait of the artist as an old man by Thomas Bernhard

Ostend - Atlantic coast, driving snow, New Year's Eve, in the hall of a hotel that has left its best days behind. This is where Minetti, an old "acting artist", ends up lonely - and at the same time in the middle of a society of "madmen". Or like-minded people? Revelers, masked people, drunks ... of whom you don't know where they come from and where they are going - they all roam the hotel lobby like beings from another world ... A comedy? A tragedy?

A "lady", smoking Virginians and drinking, talks about her method of coping with New Year's Eve (and the world?), a young "girl" awaits her "lover" and is perhaps Minetti's last hope of getting away. And then there are the hotel employees: a "porter" and a "valet". They all become Minetti's audience for his last performance.

The actor Minetti is expecting the theater director from Flensburg. He will perform one last time for the theater's bicentenary celebrations, playing Shakespeare's "Lear" once again, wearing a mask made for him personally by the famous painter James Ensor. He carries it with him in a large suitcase, along with newspaper articles about himself, his rise and fall as an actor and theater director in Lübeck - the city he then fled.

Since then, he has never performed again, lived the rest of his life in Dinkelsbühl for thirty years ... and yet never gave in, never stopped reciting Lear ... "It's madness, my lady ..."
"Minetti" - an artist's drama.

Thomas Bernhard tells of passion and delusion, of the unconditionality of artistic aspiration, of the indifference and ignorance of society and politics, of the exceptional artist's "falling out of the world" - and of the loneliness and mercilessness of ageing.

Claus Peymann, a companion of Bernhard's who has premiered many of his plays in Salzburg, Bochum, Vienna and Berlin and has himself become a Bernhard stage character, is staging the play for the first time at the Residenztheater in Munich in Achim Freyer's dream spaces.

Artistic Director

Staging Claus Peymann
Stage, costumes, lighting concept Achim Freyer
Lighting Gerrit Jurda
Dramaturgy Jutta Ferbers

Price information:

10€ for students