On May 9, 2024, Leonie Böhm’s THE RÄUBERINNEN can be experienced for the first time in Berlin on the Gorki stage. In the adaptation of Schiller’s classic Die Räuber (1782), the director explores the theater as a collaborative field of experimentation together with the actors Gro Swantje Kohlhof, Sophie Krauss, Eva Löbau and Julia Riedler. Schiller assumed that the state could not give us the freedom that makes us human. That’s why he wrote: “Man is only fully human when he plays.”
Image above: Leonie Böhms, Die Räuberinnen, foto: Esra Rotthoff, courtesy GORKI
In play, Schiller wrote, people are truly free and they long for this freedom. For director Leonie Böhm, the theater is a fantastic place for this search for freedom. This is where we play and experiment – live and together. Leonie Böhm chooses The Robbers, the work with which the young Schiller himself tried out as a playwright for the first time.
Schiller’s text tells of the brothers Franz and Karl Moor, who suffer from their father’s lack of recognition. The father is many things: an internalized critic, audience, the mirror of society and an old principle. In an attempt to emancipate themselves, the brothers get lost in the woods and in their thoughts. “What I want to do is now my business,” Franz exclaims. Why shouldn’t one live according to one’s own fictions? Why the barriers? How do we get back in the game?
Together with the ensemble, Leonie Böhm uses the old text as material to try it out herself, to “catch the soul in its most secret operations”. Real closeness without pressure, your own rules, no fear. Get out of the patterns and into liveness. Completely “free” according to Schiller.
Die Räuberinnen is a takeover of the Munich Kammerspiele.
WHEN?
Premiere: Thursday, 9. May 2024 am 7:30 pm
Monday, 24. June 2024, at 7:30 pm
WHERE?
Stage, Maxim Gorki Theater Berlin
Am Festungsgraben 2
10117 Berlin
COSTS?
Premiere tickets: € 17 – 45
Regular tickets: € 12 – 40
