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 Timofey Kulyabin, who is renowned for his precise psychological characterisation, investigates these questions.

NEXT DATES: 03./17. June

“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: 24. June, 03./05./06. July

Theater der Welt is considered one of the most important events in the international theatre scene. Initiated by the International Theatre Institute (ITI) at the end of the 1970s, it allows audiences to experience ground-breaking achievements and aesthetic developments in theatre from all over the world every three years in different cities and regions of Germany.
Theater der Welt is the state-of-the-art in performance. Switching venues, curators and organisers for each edition creates valuable synergies: between the local institutions involved, the various theatres in the respective festival cities, the international programme, as well as both local and international audiences. Theater der Welt is unique, time and time again.
The 16th edition of the festival will take place from 29 June to 16 July 2023 in Frankfurt and Offenbach – initiated, organised and implemented by the three Frankfurt cultural institutions Künstler*innenhaus Mousonturm, Museum Angewandte Kunst and Schauspiel Frankfurt, as well as the Amt für Kulturmangement der Stadt Offenbach (Offenbach Council Office for Cultural Management) as associated partner. For the first time in the history of the festival, the choice of programme directors for this edition was primarily motivated by the idea of the greatest possible change of perspective.

ANGELA – a perfectly normal life. But what actually makes ANGELA ANGELA? This multimedia stage production follows ANGELA from birth to death and beyond, meditating on illness, belonging, the nature of reality and other existential questions.
01./02. July, Schauspielhaus

A summer celebration: Catarina is expected to carry on the family tradition and kill her first fascist. But she refuses. And this is the source of conflict. How much can we break the rules of democracy in order to defend its objectives?
09./10. July, Schauspielhaus

This interdisciplinary dance piece investigates how intergenerational trauma inscribes itself in bodies and how social exclusion establishes itself by means of visible or symbolic deviation.
14./15. July, Schauspielhaus

What are you ashamed of? Why are we ashamed at all? Based on personal accounts of the relationships of three generations of women, this moving piece of theater tells of the problem of social shame and how it is passed from one generation to the next.
30. June, 01. July, Kammerspiele

A classroom in Tehran. In a hyperreal setting, the play depicts school as a site of power, discipline, and solidarity. A sensitive coming-of-age story.
05./06./07. July, Kammerspiele

Discrimination, ostracism, fights between parents and children, redemption: this new type of puppetry reinterprets tragic motifs from the Japanese legend of Shuntokumaru from a queer perspective, performed with sex dolls, mannequins, and other puppets.
14./15./16. July, Kammerspiele

Yōkai, ancient Japanese monsters, continue to populate the worlds of anime and manga. They include former Japanese soldiers and spies whose deeds and behaviors during the Second World War faded from view in post-war Japan.
01./02./03./04. July, Bockenheimer Depot

Enigmatic descendants of humanity roam across post-apocalyptic landscapes. Amid rituals, singing, dancing, idiosyncratic musical instruments, and powerful video images, past disasters merge into future dystopias.
11./12. July, Bockenheimer Depot