Vienna 1925, Albertine and Fridolin are the typical bourgeois model couple. He is a doctor, she is the perfect housewife, they have a daughter, they are happy, everything is just right. What more could you want? In a moment of familiar (or reckless?) honesty, exactly this question arises. So, the two confess to each other their repressed (erotic) longings and dreams – fleeting missed opportunities. Are they enough for each other? What follows is the surreal erotic journey through a tangled night full of bizarre encounters. When he is finally unmasked as a stranger at an orgiastic masked ball and a mysterious stranger sacrifices herself for him, the boundaries between reality and dream completely dissolve.
Arthur Schnitzler, whom Sigmund Freud once called his doppelgänger, unleashed one scandal after another with his texts. His ability to measure the subconscious and the dream in literary terms and to paint a picture of man's repressed drive nature and its consequences challenged society again and again. Freud later wrote to Schnitzler: "I have often wondered where you could have got this or that secret knowledge which I acquired by laborious research into the object." Thus, the Traumnovelle is a mystically ambiguous psychogram of the human being, meandering between waking and sleeping and as close to us today as it was 100 years ago – for what access do we really have to our suppressed desires, how consciously do our decisions turn out? What goes around comes around: the subconscious forgets and forgives nothing. Everything seeks its way to the surface, and no dream is ever just a dream.
Ulrich Rasche has created a unique theatrical language with his productions, which live from a precise, intense and choral rhythm. Three of his productions were invited to the Berlin Theatertreffen: Schiller's Die Räuber (2017), Buchner's Woyzeck (2018) and Ágota Kristof's Das große Heft (2019). Schnitzler's Traumnovelle is his first work at Schauspielhaus Bochum.
- Traumnovelle
- after Arthur Schnitzler
- Director: Ulrich Rasche
- Place: Schauspielhaus
- First performance/Premiere: 18.05.2024
- Director: Ulrich Rasche
- Director: Ulrich Rasche
With the kind support of the Freundeskreis Schauspielhaus Bochum e. V.
