Käthchens Traum

It was the age when reason was all the rage and everyone was after Enlightenment when playwright Heinrich von Kleist wrote »Das Käthchen von Heilbronn«, Germany’s iconic chivalrous tale. Theatre director Jürgen Flimm has taken this linguistic masterpiece about love, destiny and betrayal out of knightly obscurity and turned it into a radically contemporary corporate thriller in which greed, blind faith in progress and the unconditional power of love all collide with brute force. Tobias Moretti and a shining stellar ensemble conquer the unreconstructed Kleistian language with bravura. 

The former colliery »Zeche Zollverein« in Essen provides a magnificent setting for Kleist’s ever-current drama of destiny.