Theatre / Incidental Music (90 min) · 2018

Student Anselmus is in good spirits: It is Ascension Day, all of Dresden is in a celebratory mood, he is on his way to a popular excursion site, the “Linkische Bade”, the sun is shining and he has a little money in his pocket for a cup of coffee with rum and perhaps a bottle of double beer … But his good mood is soon to vanish, because he runs (how could it be otherwise with a clumsy fellow like him) while crossing the market directly into the well-filled basket of an apple woman. She is not at all thrilled, and although Anselmus is so ashamed that he hands her all his money, the wicked old woman curses him even as he flees from the marketplace. – There goes the dream of a merry revelry. Resigned, he sits down under an elder bush by the Elbe to indulge in a little self-pity. Suddenly a whispering and jingling reaches his ear – he looks into the blue eyes of a green snake – and it’s all over. He has fallen in love. With Serpentina, the daughter of the archivist and (as it will turn out) alchemist and magician Lindhorst.

Later he is no longer sure … Did he really see Serpentina, or was it just a fantasy? When he looks into the eyes of Veronika, the daughter of his friend Konrektor Paulmann, the world seems to be all right. Then he wants to become a court councillor, marry Veronika and lead a quiet, orderly life. But when he then sits in the study of Archivarius Lindhorst, for whom he works as a scribe, the world of fantasy and poetry opens up to him, he hears the loveliest melodies and is sure: to be a poet and to live with Serpentina in Atlantis, that is all he would dream of …

The reality fairy tale THE GOLDEN POT. EIN MÄRCHEN AUS DER NEUEN ZEIT is considered to be E. T. A. Hoffmann’s most successful work. He set the story in the real Dresden of the 19th century – with the declared aim that the whole should be “fairy-like and wonderful, but boldly stepping into ordinary everyday life and gripping its characters.” The up-and-coming director Anna-Elisabeth Frick, winner of the 2016 Körber Prize for Young Directors, will bring the romantic novella to the stage of the Kleines Haus in her own interpretation between drama, dance, music theater and performance.