Skip to main content

To escape her social obligations and incognito her secret wishes and desires - her true self? – to be able to live it out, the two dandies Algernon and Jack lead a double life. Algernon invents a sickly friend named Bunbury who needs to be visited regularly in the country, while Jack pretends to look after his easy-going brother Ernst in order to be able to travel to the city as often as possible.



There, as Ernst, he leads a dissolute life, while on his country estate he sets the morally inviolable role model for his ward Cecily. She in turn - like Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, whom Jack woos during his visits to the city - has decided to marry only a man named Ernst. When Algernon appears at the country estate in the role of Jack's supposed brother Ernst, the comical complications begin.


Bunbury (originally: The Importance of Being Earnest) is Oscar Wilde's most famous comedy - and also his last: Shortly after the premiere in 1895, he was sentenced to two years in prison with hard physical labor during a public trial for homosexual acts. Ruined in health, financially and socially, the author died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46. From today's perspective, Oscar Wilde's own double life, which, unlike that of his protagonists, did not have a happy ending, inevitably finds its way into this perfectly constructed comedy.


In director Claudia Bossard's fast-paced version, Oscar Wilde's comedy, peppered with linguistic humor, becomes queer theater fun, which not only blurs the linguistic boundaries between German and English in metropolitan society talk, but also liberates gender and identity images from their Victorian social corsets in a playful whirlwind.

Buy ticket

Additional information
Participating artists
Oscar Wilde (Autor/in)
Claudia Bossard
Lisa Birke Balzer (Gwendolen Fairfax)
Felix Goeser (Pastor Chasuble)
Maximiliane Haß (Cecily Cardew)
Frieder Langenberger (John Worthing)
Katrija Lehmann (Miss Prism)
Alexej Lochmann (Merriman und Lane, Butler)
Evamaria Salcher (Lady Bracknell)
Andri Schenardi (Algernon Moncrieff)
Dates
October 2024
MoTuWeThFrSaSu
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31