Macbeth can become king, so he has to become king. Macbeth has already defeated the Thane of Cawdor and the Norwegians in battle on behalf of King Duncan. According to one prophecy, he will rule the kingdom himself. His reign of tyranny starts by murdering Duncan. In order to consolidate his power, he and his unscrupulous wife, Lady Macbeth, carry out their homicidal plan. When he is afflicted by pangs of guilt, attacks of fear and insomnia, Lady Macbeth uses her complete repertoire of manipulative strategies to build him back up again. One murder follows another, until the trail of blood leads to Macbeth’s own death and “the hour when European nihilism was born,” to quote the Swiss literary scholar Peter von Matt.
Shakespeare’s tragedy is the raw material for every thriller, Macbeth and Lady Macbeth the bloodthirstiest couple of killers in literary history. Is genuine evil a latent presence whenever a society’s structures of power are based on violence? How much Macbeth and Lady Macbeth is lurking inside us? How far will we go to achieve our ambitions for power and recognition? The celebrated Russian director Timofej Kuljabin, who is renowned for his precise psychological characterisation, investigates these questions.

NEXT DATES: 07th December

Count Dracula, probably the most famous vampire in the history of culture and synonymous with absolute evil, was invented in 1897 by the Irish writer Bram Stoker. To this day, the characters from his novel – Jonathan Harker, who is held prisoner in Dracula’s castle, his wife Mina and her friend Lucy, who has fallen under the vampire’s spell, and the scientist van Helsing – continue to reappear in countless adaptations of Stoker’s Victorian horror story.
Johanna Wehner, renowned for her elaborated composed dramatisations, stages ‘Dracula’ as a study of a society that projects its own monstrosity onto an other and turns to fantasy in order to protect what it sees as its own particular virtues.

NEXT DATES: 06th December

“A girl can’t become a writer,” her father tells young Tove in working-class Copenhagen in the 1930s. Although she never fitted in with the literary circles of her time, even at an early age she would achieve some fame as an author. With her razor-sharp prose, Tove Ditlevsen had the ability to stand up to an adverse reality. In life, and if not in life, then in literature. In her auto-fictional texts, Ditlevsen describes her struggle for artistic autonomy and an identity as an artist, a woman and a mother with painful openness. One of Denmark’s most famous national authors, she has only recently been (re-)discovered by world literature. This dramatization for Schauspiel Frankfurt by Joanna Bednarczyk is based on the new German translations of Tove Ditlevsen’s works: The ‘Copenhagen Trilogy’, Ditlevsen’s central work and the story of her life, and the novel ‘Faces’, in which the author conveys how the experience of psychosis alters perceptions in extremely vivid terms. In her first work at Schauspiel Frankfurt, the Polish director Ewelina Marciniak creates an epic evening of theatre about the issue of women’s rights to control their own lives and be artists. Exploring female perspectives in the male-dominated world of the theatre is one of the director’s primary objectives.

NEXT DATES: Coming soon