What relevance could Goethe's short novel about the life-weary Werther possibly have in this day and age of video and ecstasy? Is it possible to approach this illustrious text, which has been described as the most famous ego-trip in German literature, without falling back on to insupportable and tattered sentimentality? Nicolas Stemann as director and Philipp Hochmair as actor endeavour a retelling Werther's story from their own, contemporary vantage point. The production hovering between monodrama and performance art offers much more than the insipid textbook interpretation. 

Having left home for the first time, Werther lives as if he were in a road movie, pondering the issues of freedom and the laws of nature. He examines the world of his feelings and plunges into the Self. But before he is seized by the phantom of boredom, Werther meets Lotte, the girl he falls in love with. The fact that Lotte promised herself to the “courageous man” Albert, only spurs Werther's love: is there anything more beautiful than to yearn for the unattainable? Werther would transport Lotte into the sphere of sanctity, condensing all his affection for her into the poetic text. But reality will not be substituted that easy: enter Albert to overturn all of Werther's illusions. When he realises that his romance will forever remain but a fantasy, Werther seeks to escape into quotidian hard work; only action can take his mind off contemplation. But he soon falls into a trap: the futility of his work is no less a cause of dejection than his romantic predicament. Protected by his desolation, Werther opts for tragedy, as if his life were a romantic film sans happy-end, a film of most profound loneliness, in which he is the main and sole character – a film that, unfortunately, no one wants to see.

Nicolas Stemann is one of the most lucid directors of the  generation which treats the theatre as a machine for producing illusions. His approach to the texts is reductive, his handling of the multimedia masterful. The simultaneity of the images undercuts the status of what is being shown. This aesthetic concept strongly relies upon the equally accomplished work of the dramaturge Bernd Stegemann, who counts upon the exalted fervour of speech and its liberating force, and whose jokes come wrapped in intensive emotions and witty insights.

It is fascinating how precisely Philipp Hochmair's Werther can present his feelings – he indicates the boundary between emotive interventions and their ironic counterparts most clearly. It is precisely this precision in combination with ruffled direction that makes for the bridging of the spiritual gap between Werther and the audience. 

The longstanding collaboration between Stemann, Stegemann and Hochmair is primarily a series of attempts at revaluating classical texts in order to save them from oblivion and banality imposed by time – by means of irony, playfulness, sarcasm, and if necessary, force. Stemann builds a bridge between the Sturm und Drang and the world of the young men of today, while Philipp Hochmair unerringly sets the contemporary sighs of Werther-like illusions throbbing.