Premiere on 21.09.2023
Directed by Mateja Koležnik
In1668, Molière's comedy was premiered at the Théâtre du Palais. 355 years later, Slovenian director Mateja Koležnik stages the still highly topical material in the banking city of Frankfurt. It is about nothing less than avarice.
"The Miser", as we know the 5-act comedy by Molière, goes back in essential parts to the so-called pot of gold comedy by the Roman poet Plautus. Little is known about Plautus, except that he died in 184 BC. Supposedly he wrote his comedies as a so-called mill slave, because in fact he hired himself out to a miller as a slave, after he had lost his entire fortune, which he earned on the stage, through speculative transactions. Sounds modern! Supposedly Plautus was an actor, supposedly also a comedian. He was not a desk poet, but, inspired by the stage, wrote from the practice of the theater. Molière - actually Jean-Baptiste Poquelin - also found his way to being an author as an actor. In 1668, in the last years of his long career, he wrote "L'Avare" (The Miser) as a prose comedy in which he caricatures the type of bourgeois who has become rich but remained stingy, suffocating his more fun-loving and consumerist children with his avarice. While Molière writes a hilariously intricate comedy on the subject of stinginess, Koležnik will seek and find the human transgression in it.
