Eight hours of theater? I do the math and wonder when I last did that. Now Peer Gynt is back at the Volksbühne, and Vegard Vinge, Ida Müller, and Trond Reinholdtsen are tearing Ibsen’s text apart while also taking it completely seriously. And they are taking their time. A few days earlier, Spooky Paradise opens, a work that proposes almost the opposite: Philippe Quesne stages the afterglow of the spectacle. A group of former circus performers tries to carry on what remains of their old enterprise, without grand acts or big tricks. The return of Peer Gynt, or rather, an eight-hour performance of masks, a rumbling soundtrack, video, and projections, fed by a diverse range of sources, from Norwegian landscapes to pop cultural references. At the center is Peer, a figure who invents himself, exaggerates himself, and loses himself in the process. He exists somewhere between youthful megalomania and total overwhelm. Everything here tips toward the extreme, and that’s exactly where the strange tension of the evening builds, in a production that makes no effort to make things easier for its audience.
A few days earlier, Spooky Paradise will premiere. The title alone lingers in neon letters on a scaffold somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Philippe Quesne is not building a grand spectacle here so much as a situation. People who once worked in the circus stand, without animals and without big tricks, trying to figure out what comes next. It could be an abandoned fairground, with a multilingual ensemble of actors and musicians, including Kathrin Angerer, Martin Wuttke and Marie Rosa Tietjen, drifting through it melancholically. Costume designer Tabea Braun gives this in-between world its own distinctive look, frozen somewhere in the past. The group feels its way forward, toward the possibility that hope still exists, and you with them, if you want to keep an evening free in May. (Or half a day.)
Text: Emma Zylla / Photos: Julian Röder, Philippe Quesne
Volksbühne, Linienstr.227, 10178 Berlin–Mitte; map
Peer Gynt from 15.05.2026. Dates and tickets found here.
Spooky Paradise premieres 30.04.2026. Dates and tickets found here.
@volksbuehne_berlin
