The 2026 Shortlisted Productions
The 10 Most Remarkable Productions 2026
The ten most remarkable productions from the last season were selected by a jury of critics to provide a condensed insight into the German-language theatre landscape.
A Year without Summer
by Florentina Holzinger
Direction, choreography and performance: Florentina Holzinger
Premiere: 21.5.2025 (Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz)
A production by Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin), Florentina Holzinger/Spirit and neon lobster in co-production with Tanzquartier Wien, International Summer Festival Kampnagel, Dansenhus Stockholm, DE SINGEL, Maska Ljubljana, asphalt Festival, Rising Melbourne, Factory International Manchester, Divine Comedy International Theater Festival / Łaźnia Nowa Theater (Kraków) and Marvaða Iceland
Funded by the Capital Cultural Fund (HKF) and the City of Vienna Department of Cultural Affairs
volksbuehne.berlin
Jury Statement
“What does one do in a ‘year without summer’, when the world is darkened by volcanic eruptions and plunging temperatures? When this happened in 1816, the 18-year-old writer Mary Shelley thought up the monster Frankenstein. Florentina Holzinger conflates all these events and together with her performers, who this time include a crew of actors some of whom are in their Eighties, embarks on a wild and exceptionally lucid ride through homo sapiens’ history of optimisation. In spectacular and highly complex scenes she presents the planet’s status quo alongside the story of how the human body deteriorates and – while the robot dogs are already preparing to attack – questions the curse and promise of eternal life. Defying the darkness, all this takes place in the form of a musical that is overflowing with ideas and visuals, and which ends in the most literal fake faecal orgy in theatre history. How an absolutely kitsch-free utopia emerges here within the most unsparing truth imaginable is something that has never been seen like this in the theatre before.”
– Christine Wahl for the Theatertreffen-jury
A Year without Summer
© Nicole Marianna Wytyczak
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
A German fairy tale by Carl Zuckmayer
Direction and stage design: Sebastian Hartmann
Premiere: 20.9.2025
Staatstheater Cottbus
staatstheater-cottbus.de
Jury Statement
“What can be done with a 95-year-old ‘German fairy tale’ in which a cunning cobbler marches into Köpenick town hall wearing a junk shop uniform? And which seems to have been considered a superior TV comedy ever since the 1956 film version with Heinz Rühmann, though people are fond of forgetting that its underlying subject – the soldier inside everyone – is not remotely funny? Sebastian Hartmann and his splendid ensemble have a brilliant idea: they conceal neither the depths nor the comic aspects of the material – albeit without reproducing the comedy in its stricter sense. Hartmann has copied the facade of Cottbus’s theatre on stage. This bears an inscription ‘Der deutschen Kunst’ – to German art – and what happens now is a marionette theatre of (not only) German mental history in which a gifted theatrical team with a talent for (self-)irony probe Carl Zuckmayer’s play for its contemporary relevance. On the surface it looks as if the crew had casually enriched a backstage comedy with discursive material. But in fact, it gets deep down inside the nature and presence of the soldier – including in the theatre.”
– Christine Wahl for the Theatertreffen-jury
Der Hauptmann von Köpenick
© Bernd Schönberger
Die Glasmenagerie
A memory play by Tennessee Williams
Direction: Jaz Woodcock-Stewart
Premiere: 30.1.2025
Theater Basel
theater-basel.ch
Jury Statement
“A soft spot for a narrative-based aesthetic is considered typical for the UK. Jaz Woodcock-Stewart is one of the young British directors who are skilled storytellers but don’t simply retell the story. She gives Tennessee Williams’ Die Glasmenagerie (The Glass Menagerie) at Theater Basel a very contemporary drive without breaking up the text – which is set in the late 1930s. Contemporary powerplates, vibrating plates from the gym, don’t exactly encourage muscle development here – on the contrary, they are ironically inverted to be congenial symbols that all the structures offering any support are being undermined. The three main characters get lost between the bare concrete walls. A staircase leads into nothingness, and a ramp down to a reduced life, with no money and no contact with the outside world. The queer daughter escapes into a kind of hikikomori existence. For one visitor to the family a (house) facade will briefly be tipped over the hollow life of the unlucky trio; it won’t do any good. A quiet, strongly symbolic and moving work!”
– Alexandra Kedves for the Theatertreffen-jury
Die Glasmenagerie
© Lucia Hunziker
Die Welt im Rücken
by Thomas Melle
Direction: Lucia Bihler
Premiere: 27.9.2025
Schauspiel Stuttgart
schauspiel-stuttgart.de
Jury Statement
“The entire stage here mutates into a psycho-physical space; from Paula Wellmann’s breathing and at times blushing pink curtains to the driving sounds of Sixtus Preiss, everything contributes to making Thomas Melle’s text full of pain and humour visible and tangible. At the heart of this Gesamtkunstwerk is the wonderful Paulina Alpen. In Victoria Behr’s red body armour – and at times against it – she acts out both the weight felt in periods of depression and the thunderous hail of neurons in manic phases. And none of this is overdone. She even makes losing it a matter of elegance. Six Alpen lookalikes represent Melle’s ‘hybrid agents’: satellites like echoes of her own self that also reflect the reactions of the majority society to inadequate behaviour. The evening has the pop aesthetic familiar from Lucia Bihler, but is never reliant on effects, instead it is deeply humane and takes its audience on a rollercoaster of emotions.”
– Sabine Leucht for the Theatertreffen-jury
Die Welt im Rücken
© Julian Baumann
Fräulein Else
freely adapted from Arthur Schnitzler
by Leonie Böhm and Julia Riedler
Direction: Leonie Böhm
Premiere: 8.2.2025
Volkstheater, Vienna
volkstheater.at
Jury Statement
“Almost every line of Leonie Böhm and Julia Riedler’s Schnitzler adaptation is from 1924. However, the text lands firmly in the present thanks to the exceptional performance of Julia Riedler as Else. She turns the stream of consciousness of an eighteen-year-old who is blackmailed into undressing in front of a family friend to raise money to cover her father’s debts into a lively dialogue with the audience. In doing so, Riedler gives those watching a clear share of responsibility, making them accomplices in Else’s inescapable situation. With an incredibly quick wit and a twinkling nonchalance she holds the auditorium in the palm of her hand – and takes pleasure in winding her audience around her little finger. Her Else is wide awake, fearless and unpredictable. As a result, this evening based on Schnitzler’s construct progressively dreams of a utopia for our time, where the abuse of power is still omnipresent. A radically contemporary solo and an exercise in empathy at the same time.”
– Vincent Koch for the Theatertreffen-jury
Fräulein Else
© Marcel Urlaub
Il Gattopardo
by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Translation by Burkhart Kroeber
Adapted for the stage by Pınar Karabulut and Hannah Schünemann
Direction: Pınar Karabulut
Premiere: 29.11.2025
Schauspielhaus Zürich
schauspielhaus.ch
Jury Statement
“Evenings of theatre like Pınar Karabulut’s adaptation of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo (The Leopard) have become rare. Together with stage designer Michela Flück and costume designer Sara Valentina Giancare, Karabulut brings aristocratic Sicily in the era of the Risorgimento back to life in a magical way. The opulence of the rooms and costumes and the almost seamless psychological playing of the ensemble draw the audience deep into the 19th century, where they can lose themselves in the beauty of this world in decline and in the melancholy noblesse of Prince Don Fabrizio played by Markus Scheumann. At the same time, they can also recognise symptoms of our own changing times. Karabulut sticks closely to Lampedusa’s novel and by doing so keeps our own crisis-torn reality in view. Scheumann’s concluding monologue is not only a dying man’s moving assessment of his life. It is also a warning not to be like Don Fabrizio and to fight for what exists.”
– Sascha Westphal for the Theatertreffen-jury
Il Gattopardo
© Krafft Angerer
Mephisto
based on the novel of a career by Klaus Mann
Direction: Jette Steckel
Premiere: 28.2.2025
Münchner Kammerspiele
muenchner-kammerspiele.de
Jury Statement
“Jette Steckel and her team have succeeded in creating an evening that shapes Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto plus a few lines added from other sources into a trenchant and topical study of the relationship between art and power. Thomas Schmauser offers a virtuoso portrayal of Hendrik Höfgen’s transformation from the pioneer of a ‘revolutionary theatre’ to an opportunistic Nazi favourite motivated by a mixture of artistic vanity and some residual ideas about resistance. He carefully explores the character from the inside, showing him to be flawed, argumentative and/or acting being argumentative. That Steckel shows even this evening’s domestic scenes as a play within a play is entirely consistent. This is a portrait of a human type to whom art means the world, one committed to the illusion that the theatre is a refuge that will ultimately remain inviolate. No way! Watching this superb ensemble at work, we see people whom the New Right would be only too happy to exclude from the stage. This alignment between the historical past and the potential future really hurts.”
– Sabine Leucht for the Theatertreffen-jury
Mephisto
© Armin Smailovic
Serotonin
based on the novel Sérotonine by Michel Houellebecq
German translation by Stephan Kleiner
Adapted for the stage by Sebastian Hartmann
Direction and stage design: Sebastian Hartmann
Premiere: 13.12.2025
Hans Otto Theater, Potsdam
hansottotheater.de
Jury Statement
“Sebastian Hartmann has never presented such a radically reduced and purist production. His stage adaptation of Michel Houellebecq’s novel Sérotonine is a masterpiece of theatrical minimalism: it needs no more than a white box containing just a white wooden bench, a single spotlight and, of course, Guido Lambrecht. Lambrecht spends a good five hours lingering in this space whose whiteness seems to expunge anything else, laying before us the messed-up life of Houellebecq’s first person narrator Florent-Claude Labrouste. This merciless account of a failed man is repeatedly interrupted by a second, intra-German life story, that broadens and comments on Labrouste’s toxic view of the world. Meanwhile Lambrecht’s acting, as reticent as it is precise, is a minor theatrical sensation. It allows us to see inside one man’s gaping chasms and find the core of the anti-modern thinking so virulent right now.”
– Sascha Westphal for the Theatertreffen-jury
Serotonin
© Thomas M. Jauk
Three Times Left is Right
by Julian Hetzel
Concept and direction: Julian Hetzel
World premiere: 17.5.2025 (Wiener Festwochen | Free Republic of Vienna)
A production by Studio Julian Hetzel in co-production with Wiener Festwochen | Free Republic of Vienna and Schauspiel Leipzig, in co-operation with De Balie (Amsterdam), SPRING Performing Arts Festival (Utrecht) and Theater Utrecht
julian-hetzel.com | festwochen.at | schauspiel-leipzig.de
Jury Statement
“Julian Hetzel has devised an unconventional and stunning chamber play inspired by the relationship between a left-wing cultural scholar and a new right thinker from Vienna. How do they manage to live together when their views of the world are diametrically opposed? Kristien de Proost and Josse De Pauw play a couple for whom political conflicts have invaded their personal lives. With microscopic precision Hetzel zooms in on the internal aspects of their relationship, where conversations in the playground unsettle the certainties of an established institution. In a minimalist setting the pair deliver a heated battle over who has the better ideology – exemplifying how society is divided. Why are the left’s thought patterns so swiftly hijacked by the right? With disconcerting humour Hetzel constructs idiosyncratic images for the heated climate of debate and for radicalisation – until even the subtitles take on a life of their own. One watches the performance with sweaty palms and leaves this cleverly conceived and stimulating evening absolutely shattered. A masterpiece of provocation.”
– Vincent Koch for the Theatertreffen-jury
Three Times Left is Right
© Rolf Arnold
Wallenstein
A slaughter feast in seven courses
adapted from Friedrich Schiller
Direction: Jan-Christoph Gockel
Premiere: 4.10.2025
Münchner Kammerspiele
muenchner-kammerspiele.de
Jury Statement
“A dual portrait of the mechanics of war and an exuberant celebration of the theatre: this Wallenstein accomplishes both these and much more. Jan-Christoph Gockel and his team of individualists take seven hours over it. But the fact that these don’t drag is due to the multitude of perspectives presented on the material, which sometimes grate but always argue wonderfully with each other. The piece is about armies of mercenaries past and present, about military puppet masters who are hanging precariously by a thread themselves, about loyalty and the difficulty of ending wars. Central to the visual worlds and humour of the evening are Schiller’s famous line ‘war nourishes war’, the figure of the Russian mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Harry Potter spell ‘riddikulus’, which transforms frightening creatures into something comic and dispels the paralysis of fear. In this immersive masterpiece, however, with elements of investigative and literary theatre, performance, live acting and puppetry, subtle irony, satire and seriousness, everything remains in motion. Even hope for the human being within the soldier.”
– Sabine Leucht for the Theatertreffen-jury
Wallenstein
© Armin Smailovic