Die Wiedervereinigung der beiden Koreas

What is our concept of love today? People fall in love because they are curious, impatient, bored or by coincidence, because they enjoy seducing or being seduced. In brief, trenchant scenes, Joël Pommerat throws highlights on an age-old and yet timeless topic: love. Encounters occur between couples and passers-by, strollers, nomads, searchers and the missing, married couples, ex-partners, children, neighbours and work colleagues. They wander around an everyday scenery that suddenly turns out to be an expansive landscape full of dark corners, hideouts and blind spots. On their expeditions, they discover what a vast and dangerous field this thing called love really is. Mundane everyday situations go astray on calamitous paths, reveal mysterious abysses and anxieties. Slight adversities develop into absurd stories of subtle drollness, into small and huge disasters of love. Where is this invisible love? What promise does it hold in our age of perhaps not endless, but certainly manifold possibilities? How to love unconditionally and still remain free, to be both dependent and independent? How to commit to one option when another seems to be just around the corner, holding the promise of another lover? The love we look for turns out to be an illusion that repeats itself in variations. Again and again, Pommerat rolls the dice and introduces new moves to the game.

This is Schauspiel Leipzig’s fifth production at the Leipzig Zoo. The zoo’s landscaped garden becomes a natural laboratory of love. An environment where love can be examined in ongoing test arrangements. In this open air theatre, Schauspiel Leipzig’s acting company cross our paths in ever changing guises. Under the open skies of a summer night, the actors take on 39 different role in scenes and variations on the theme of love.

Author and director Joël Pommerat is one of the most frequently-performed contemporary French dramatists. His works have received numerous awards in France, including the Prix Molière. In 2006, the Festival d’Avignon presented a showcase of his productions.

Tilo Krügel has been a member of Schauspiel Leipzig’s acting company since the beginning of Enrico Lübbe’s artistic directorship. Previously, he had worked at Theater Chemnitz as an actor while staging his own productions in Chemnitz, Gera, Altenburg and Zittau. His most recent production is “Vater” by Florian Zeller, which is on the programme of Schauspiel Leipzig’s Diskothek.