"Stories from the Vienna Woods - People's Theater"

The butcher Oskar loves Marianne, the daughter of the king of magic, and wants to marry her. However, during the engagement party, a scandal erupts: Marianne falls head over heels for the scoundrel Alfred, breaks off her engagement with Oskar, and leaves her old life behind. It quickly becomes clear that her hope for a new, grand, and above all, entirely different world will not withstand reality. The initially thrilling connection leads to social decline. And in the air, there is a ringing and singing reminiscent of a waltz melody... "A Viennese folk play against the Viennese folk play," Erich Kästner called the work of his fellow writer. In fact, Horváth radically breaks with the tradition of drama while also rewriting and advancing it. He portrays the suburban idyll as a facade behind which excesses of meanness and malice unfold, with language serving as a makeshift disguise for one’s own insecurity and hopelessness. He always emphasized that his aim was not to unmask humanity, but rather to unmask consciousness. His goal is not satire, but "to depict the world as it unfortunately is."

House director Rieke Süßkow, known for her radical works at the intersection of acting, choreography, installation, and rhythmic composition, has received multiple awards for her productions (including the 2023 and 2024 Berliner Theatertreffen). With Ödön von Horváth, she explores the lines of tradition in folk theater, referencing performance forms of early folk plays, which include means of alienation and exaggeration. This results, among other things, in a non-realistic casting of characters. She also makes the waltz melodies inscribed in the text a central formal principle of an evening that makes the violence hidden beneath the "ringing and singing" palpable as structurally directed against women* – also because it is deliberately not only perpetrated on women's bodies.