Theatertreffen-Blog

“Black is the New Black” was the title Martin Thomas Pesl gave last year to his essay of the 2025 Theatertreffen, and Matthias Pees welcomed the audience with the words: “welcome to the abyss.” A year later we register with some dismay that the state of the world remains black and is now possibly even a shade darker. Across the globe wars rage, autocratic rulers dominate public debate and extreme right-wing parties continue to gain support, including in our own country.

In these circumstances we ask ourselves: how should theatre approach this? Should it be a place that is beyond politics, free from current lines of conflict and political references? Is it somewhere where we should engage collectively with well-told stories, immerse ourselves in worlds of our own, in the way that Lucia Bihler, for example, takes us into the inner life of someone with bipolar disorder in her stage adaptation of Thomas Melle’s novel Die Welt im Rücken?

Or should the theatre make a point of engaging with these conflicts and references, programming texts like Klaus Mann’s Mephisto about fascism, which makes the threat to culture from populist politicians feel like a familiar story? Should theatre maybe even interweave real political characters with older texts as Jan-Christoph Gockel does in his first work to be invited to Theatertreffen, Wallenstein. A slaughter feast in seven courses with the mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, boss of the Wagner Group, who died in 2023? Might anchoring theatre in political reality in this way even help to counter the repeated fears of it losing significance?
We will discuss this with Jan-Christoph Gockel when he comes in to visit the Blog’s editorial team. The director and artistic director in Salzburg, Nuran David Calis, will also write a guest article for us on how political theatre should be.

In addition to pursuing this key question, as usual we will focus on networking our emerging critics with other theatre lovers, such as those in the International Forum. We would like to empower them to form their own critical opinions of the invited productions and to capture these in writing, pictures or speech.
Here we will be helped by Christian Rakow, one of the Editors-in-Chief of the online theatre platform nachtkritik.de, who will lead a workshop with the bloggers where they explore the building blocks that a theatre review should contain.

The journalist and author Kolja Fach, who works for Der SPIEGEL and various ARD editorial teams, will familiarise the blog team with key criteria in social media thinking and introduce them to the programme Cap Cut, with which they can make their own reels.

And Barbara Behrendt, who reports on the Berlin theatre landscape for outlets including rbb and Deutschlandfunk, will provide some input on audio reviews.

We also look forward to a visit from three members of the jury responsible for selecting the productions shown this year. They will give us an insight into the level of unanimity and willingness to compromise that are required to agree on the ten most remarkable productions.

The team has now been joined by Frieda Ahrens from Bremen, who brings with her particular expertise in the area of social media – welcome on board and we look forward to a great time with our 2026 bloggers!

Grete Götze
Concept and Editor Theatertreffen-Blog 2026