Was ihr wollt

Orsino loves Olivia. He sends his servant Cesario to her bearing a love letter. But Orsino’s love remains unrequited. What neither he nor Olivia realise: Cesario is only disguised as a man and is actually called Viola. Thus begins a comedy about appearances and reality, and about longing for a desire beyond the conventional.

In her work, Lies Pauwels creates poetic visual theatre in which pop references and baroque music collide and uproariously funny moments are juxtaposed with scenes of deeply sad melancholy. Now, she is taking on perhaps the most beautiful literary manifesto of unfulfilled love and the impossibility of desire: Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night – or What You Will”.

Following celebrated productions at the Schauspielhaus Bochum and the Vienna Burgtheater, Lies Pauwels is now bringing her unique visual language to Munich for the first time.

“The play ‘Was ihr wollt’ (‘Twelfth Night – or What You Will’) reminds me of a night I experienced in a New York bar in 2000 when men in drag spontaneously organised a voguing competition and turned the bar into a catwalk. They were self-deprecating, garish, deeply proud, sensual, and only ostensibly superficial: ‘Was ihr wollt’ (‘Fake it till you make it’), searching for the other’s gaze, playing with desire, masquerading, deception and role assignations in a world full of narcissism in which we constantly turn ourselves into objects.”

– Edmund Telgenkämper, actor