Name: The Lover
Start: 2025-10-11T00:00:00
Location: Theater Basel

Lisa Van Cauwenbergh

Sandra Bourdais

Cheng-An Wu

Maurus Gauthier

Jade Zanotti

Ana Paula Camargo

Jamal Uhlmann

Rosario Guerra

Anthony Ramiandriosa

Parker Gamble

Lydia Caruso

Verónica Segovia

Feiza Bessard

Eva Blunno

Floris Puts

Dayne Florence

Elliana Mannella

Chisato Ide

Sol Bilbao Lucuix

Carla Wieden Dobón

Heidi Lauterbach

Michaela Springer

Marco Goecke

Udo Haberland

Theater Basel

«I am young, rich, and educated; and I am unhappy, neurotic, and alone.» These words open ‹Mars›, the cult book of the early 1980s. Raised in affluence, Zurich native Fritz Angst feels cheated out of life and raised to death by the bourgeois coldness of his world. Shortly before losing his battle with cancer in 1976, he wrote a passionate tirade under the name Fritz Zorn: his illness was not a personal fate, but a reflection of social decay. The book became a scandalous point of reference for the angry Swiss youth of the 1980s.

Mars

A spectacular founding of a city: Benedikt von Peters’ spatial staging invites the audience to wander through the supposed paradise city of Mahagonny. Here, there is endless pleasure and everything is permitted, as long as you can pay – «but something is missing!». To escape the emptiness, the inhabitants eat and drink themselves to death, fuck and box their way to the grave. Only in Jim Mahoney does the idea of a more humane existence quietly take root.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

The most successful book by Marguerite Duras (1914–1996), in which she recounts—at least in part autobiographically—a socially unheard-of amour fou, is set in former Indochina during the French colonial era, in a large city shrouded in haze and heat. The main character is a young woman wearing an oversized men's hat and gold shoes. Her father died early, her mother is mentally unstable, and her brothers are highly problematic. The only ray of hope and escape from this family prison is her encounter with a rich Chinese man in a black limousine. It is a love that has no future and yet lasts a lifetime, transcending all conventions, even though the two never spoke again after the narrator left for Paris – except for a single phone call at the end.

The Lover