What first sounds like autumn melancholy turns into confidence: Yes, the new season at the Munich Volkstheater will probably be difficult again. After two years spoiled by corona, people are now making energy-saving plans, cultural advisor Anton Biebl is not fooling himself. The Volkstheater, which is still brand new, is not in a bad position: LED lamps, activated by motion detectors, state-of-the-art technology. The temperature should be regulated down to 19 degrees. Then there’s the question of artistic sustainability: shouldn’t we be playing more well-tried stuff? How many premieres does it actually need?
“One longs for normality,” said artistic director Christian Stückl at the press conference. After all, he is happy about the budget of 18.3 million euros that the Volkstheater asked for and received from the city. And: the theater had an occupancy rate of 88 percent in 2021/2022. That can be seen as a success after a season in which the spectators came to many houses very hesitantly. The Volkstheater certainly still benefited from the magic of the new, but they also do a lot of things right: a young program of young artists, woke, not too woke, eager to experiment, yet not exhausting.
Until Christmas it’s going to be cheerful and feminist
This is how it should continue in 2022/2023. Eleven premieres, that’s the answer to Biebl’s question, is definitely needed. Less than last year, it’s better to wait and see. Until Christmas there is mainly “feminism, but also with humor”, if that is a genre: “The lost honor of Katharina Blum”, staged by in-house director Philipp Arnold, the famous parable on the media business. Then “Pussy Sludge”, a play by the American Gracie Gardner, directed by Mirjam Loibl, in which, why not, oil constantly oozes out of a woman’s vulva, making her a coveted object. And Christina Tscharyiski takes on the “Hildensaga” by Ferdinand Schmalz, which deals with Brünhild and Kriemhild from the Nibelungen.
Stückl himself stages Dostoyevsky’s “Brothers Karamazov”, Bonn Park, to which the theater owes the wonderful “Gymnasium”, develops the play “Everything is over, but we have each other (underwater)”; just to name a few. The “Alien Disco” music festival curated by the Acher brothers, which has been aligned with the Kammerspiele for years, will also take place this time in the Volkstheater, “Radikal Jung” at the end of April 2023 that day anyway in the end no one was talking.