Doktor Watzenreuthers Vermächtnis – Ein Wunschdenkfehler
Theatre

Do not miss!
Only 2 performances left


  • World premiere
  • Interesting for people aged 14+
  • With English surtitles (except for the premiere)
  • 1 hour 50 minutes without intermission

A new case for Christoph Marthaler

Christoph Marthaler invites you to the conference table. Because that's where Doctor Watzenreuther can be found. His advice is just as much in demand at family celebrations as at board meetings. Especially in times of crisis. Dr Watzenreuther is a master of vague diagnoses and speaks from experience. Because his own idealistic and financial legacy has fallen into disrepute. In his new world premiere, Christoph Marthaler sets out on the trail of an identity that is difficult to fathom and once again recognises the system behind it.

Mediathek

Much of Christoph Marthaler's new theatrical invention ‹Doktor Watzenreuthers Vermächtnis – Ein Wunschdenkfehler› seems familiar: most of the actors, the stupendous musicality of the sequences, the freedom of associations. And yet some things are different this time, more evil, darker.

Süddeutsche Zeitung

But Marthaler can rely on a great ensemble: Marie Löcker with an icy expression, Vera Flück with wild laughter, Ueli Jäggi with a bulbous nose, Raphael Clamer with a crazy drum solo on everything available in the room. Carina Braunschmidt with an eloquent «vow of silence» and Peter Keller as a dry-as-dust valet.

Nachtkritik

The stage design is great and holds many surprises. The characters are, as always, grandiosely grotesque and there are also slapsticky, tragic-comic moments.

SRF 2 Kultur

In Marthaler's play, the power that is invoked in idiotic repetitions of the same phrases, gestures and scenes is one thing above all: past.It is the empty rhetoric of yesterday's politicians and men who revel in the sight of their family trees and, like a broken record, repeat the same eavesdropped slogans over and over again. There is a revealing comedy in this, while at the same time an atmosphere of fatalism, absurdity, bureaucracy and apathy is created in the form of parody.

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

(A Marthaler evening) that you definitely can't work out.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur

The evening's political and social explosiveness shone through the subtly entertaining cloud.

SDA

The play irritates and breaks expectations - as it should be in the theater.

Basler Zeitung

An urn plays in 6/8 time and the obligatory sotto voce choir takes «0 mio babbino caro» as its lament, which turns into a grotesque parody: welcome to Dr. Puccini's root canal treatment! In moments like these, the gifted cast shows how to entertain - and proves its sense of timing. No gag comes too often, no silence lasts too long. Meanwhile, the effect of minimal gestures is celebrated. The head tilts, the mood collides. Great cinema.

BZ Basel

Marthaler has been a master of suppressed feelings and swallowed resentments since his early days. In view of the political crises of the present, his work suddenly takes on a new explosiveness.

Südkurier

Marthaler was never just funny or comical.Ever since his earliest soldier song evenings in Basel, his productions have always been underpinned by a quiet desperation. There has always been this alert sensorium for the pre-, post- and crypto-fascist. But his theater images have never been as bitter and gloomy as this time.

NZZ

More at the Schauspielhaus: