German premier

The puppets are facing each other in silence, waiting patiently. A deadly silence dominates the casemates, broken only by the plopping of the thawing ice. A powerful rubber stamp returns the puppets to reality, a world in which work has become scarce.

Music roars through the basement labyrinth and seems to appease in an encouraging way. But swelling masses of tiny puppets are climbing up the table, the army of unemployed is becoming alarmingly huge. The situation worsens until it finally reaches a fatal ending …

This tale of puppets that set out to hunt for lost jobs is the theatre’s stroke of fortune. Reality reflects in a surrealistic and highly imaginative interaction of man, language, puppets, music, objects and space without being realistic at all for a single moment.

Theater ohne Grenzen (Theatre without boundaries) was founded in 1993 by Martina Winkel (theatre scientist) and Airan Berg (actor and director) as a puppet, object and silhouette theatre for adults. Poetry and humour, musicality and experiment, define their productions that generally have a socio-political context. As an accordion player and in the realm of free jazz, Otto Lechner is an European celebrity. His music clearly characterises »Schlappstock«.

For the first time in its history are the Pleißenburg casemates below Leipzig’s new city hall now open to the theatre. Searching for a play to suit this setting lead to »Schlappstock« that spatially as well as thematically is ideally suited for this extremely thrilling environment. The combination of history and present, of play and solemnity promises to become a stroke of luck in our city’s theatre life.

At the very site where the new city hall now is, once stood the Pleißenburg, a heavily fortified castle built at the beginning of the 13th century to dominate the city. After heavy damages caused through hostile sieges, the old castle was razed by Duke Moritz of Saxony and, starting in 1549, a triangular-shaped fortification with deep casemates and moats was built at the duke’s command by Hieronymus Lotter and Paul Speck.

About the casemates, they are the last remaining vestiges of this fortification which was razed in 1897 to make room for the new city hall, built from 1899-1905 by Hugo Licht. The present 115 meter tall round tower stands directly on the foundation of the mediaeval Pleißenburg tower.