About the work
"Der Liebling" ("The Darling") is a feminist farce by the playwright Svenja Viola Bungarten, premiered on 14 March 2025 at the Deutsches Theater Berlin (directed by Anita Vulesica). With strongly exaggerated characters – a tradwife, a CEO in love with her arch-rival, and two sisters on a revenge mission – the play dissects power, career and the question of whether feminism automatically means solidarity.
Plot
At its centre is CEO Franka König, who will stop at nothing for her career and enjoys humiliating her whiny son Karsten. Around her, Bungarten arranges a panopticon of grotesque figures whose paths become entangled in intrigue, power games and thirst for revenge. Rather than a realistic narrative, the farce relies on exaggeration and pace to demonstrate that the abuse of power is by no means an exclusively male phenomenon – and that female solidarity does not automatically follow from shared experience. Along the way, the play satirises the world of work and self-optimisation.
Cultural significance
Svenja Viola Bungarten is among the prominent younger voices in German-language drama. "Der Liebling" shifts the usual perspective of feminist material: instead of a victim narrative, the play delivers a biting comedy about women in power – and about the ambivalences of success, competition and hierarchy. The evening thus belongs to a contemporary theatre that negotiates questions of gender with humour, sharpness and without moral certainty.