Theatertreffen 2026 opens tomorrow with Il Gattopardo
Tomorrow night, on 1 May 2026, the Theatertreffen will open its 63rd edition at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele in the elaborate and richly detailed palace decor of Il Gattopardo, a production by Schauspielhaus Zürich. Director Pınar Karabulut and her team tell the story of the decline of a family and a way of life in a period of political upheaval in a series of opulent scenes.
Running until Sunday, 17 May, the festival funded by the GermanFederal Cultural Foundation will present the ten most remarkable productions of the season at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele, the Berliner Ensemble, the Deutsches Theater Berlin, the HAU Hebbel am Ufer (HAU1) and at the Hans Otto Theater in Potsdam. This year there will also be a TT-Nachspiel: as the production A Year without Summer by Florentina Holzinger cannot be programmed in May for scheduling reasons, it will be shown at the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz on 10 and 11 October. Almost all the performances are currently sold out: any remaining tickets are available from the webshop and at the evening box offices.
The selected productions tell of people whose moral convictions – as a result of hunger for power, shame, vanity or opportunism – have been destabilised. Many of the productions reinterpret familiar texts and transpose them to the present. In doing so they represent a spectrum of contemporary theatre: from lavishly designed productions such as Il Gattopardo to austere interpretations like Serotonin, from the docufiction of Three Times Left is Right to the seven-hour stage marathon of Wallenstein. A slaughter feast in seven courses, from the solo Fräulein Else to ensemble performances in Mephisto and Der Hauptmann von Köpenick, from the story of a dysfunctional family in Die Glasmenagerie to the introspective tale of Die Welt im Rücken and a mix of dance, acrobatics, horror and music in A Year without Summer. After the events, the audience is warmly invited to the TT Canteen, the new meeting place in the Kassenhalle, which offers an expanded range of food and drinks.
Three performances at the Haus der Berliner Festspiele will also feature live audio description in German – Il Gattopardo on 2 May, Die Glasmenagerie on 5 May and Die Welt im Rücken on 14 May. In addition, the production of Il Gattopardo will be broadcast with German audio description on 3sat on 16 May at 20:15 and will be available from 1 May for one year in the Berliner Festspiele media library and the 3sat media library.
Drama and Discourse in the Framing Programme
The framing programme focusses on the social and individual issues raised by the 10 selected productions in a series of talks, film screenings and an exhibition. This year it is curated by the theatre, film and media critic Matthias Dell. In conversations with pop theorist Diedrich Diedrichsen, CDU politician Ruprecht Polenz, rapper Ebow, Professor of Social Work Francis Seeck, journalist and author Teresa Bücker and former top manager Vera Schneevoigt, questions will be discussed around care work, intersectional classism and media concepts of “left” and “right”. The programme of talks is complemented by two film screenings and the group exhibition It Is Reel – Theatertreffen Meets TikTok in the foyer of the Haus der Berliner Festspiele.
The discourse programme is funded by the Federal Agency for Civic Education (bpb).
The framing programme will also provide a stage for new voices in contemporary playwriting in the format Mehr Drama!. From 14 to 16 May Sivan Ben Yishai, Necati Öziri, Sasha Marianna Salzmann, Ferdinand Schmalz, Gerhild Steinbuch and Paula Thielecke will each present one voice of contemporary playwriting they personally have nominated. The chosen authors are Dora Yuemin Cheng, Lennart Kos, Jara Nassar, Sharon Dodua Otoo, Laura Uribe and Leonie Ziem. Their texts will be presented as part of Mehr Drama! in readings with distinguished actors including Lilith Stangenberg and Charly Hübner, and in the conversations that follow.
Mehr Drama! is a collaboration between the Theatertreffen produced by the Berliner Festspiele and the theatre publishers Felix Bloch Erben, S.Fischer Verlage, henschel Schauspiel, Rowohlt Verlag, Suhrkamp Verlag, Verlag der Autoren and Verband Deutscher Bühnen- und Medienverlage e.V., and is funded by the Heinz und Heide Dürr Stiftung.
International Forum
The International Forum is a scholarship programme for aspiring artists in the performing arts from all around the world. 33 artists will come together during the 2026 Theatertreffen under the leadership of Aljoscha Begrich and Sima Djabar Zadegan at the Floating University to watch theatre together and share their thoughts, experiments and connections. Inspired by the location, which was once the reservoir for Tempelhof airport, in workshops with the artists Rolf Abderhalden (Mapa Teatro), Shelley Etkin and Christophe Meierhans they will explore how theatre can be imagined and practised beyond an exclusively human perspective.
In The Forum’s Forum on 6 May the participants will give short mini lectures that provide insights into the worlds in which they work and their ways of thinking and take a creative approach to communicating artistic questions in local and global contexts.
The International Forum is held in co-operation with the Goethe Institut, the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia, the Republic of Austria’s Federal Ministry of Housing, Arts, Culture, Media and Sport and Kultur | lx - Arts Council Luxembourg. It receives support from the Deutsche Bühnenverein. Additional funding for 2026 is received from the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Social Cohesion, the Hamburg Department of Culture and Media, the Cultural Department of the State Capital Munich, the Ministry of Science and Culture for Lower Saxony, the Cultural Foundation of the Free State of Saxony, the State Chancellery and Ministry of Culture of the State of Saxony-Anhalt and the Ministry of Education, Science and Culture of Thuringia. This initiative is co-financed with tax revenues from the budget approved by the State Parliament of Saxony.
Theatertreffen-Blog
The Theatertreffen-Blog, for which Grete Götze has conceptual and editorial responsibility in collaboration with Frieda Ahrens, is regarded as an editorial workshop in which theatre and arts journalism is explored in the context of an ongoing festival. It is intended as a development programme for journalists who are still at an early point in their careers and seeks to enable diverse voices to gain access to the worlds of media and culture. The five aspiring arts journalists Marie-Louise Fürnsinn, Jean Maurer, Ella Rendtorff, Melvin Schwertel and Ceren Yildirim will report critically direct from the Theatertreffen.
The Theatertreffen-Blog is funded by the Stiftung Presse-Haus NRZ.
The festival thanks all its cooperation partners and supporters, as well as everyone involved, for their collaboration.