About the work
“Sankt Falstaff” (Saint Falstaff) is a play by the Austrian dramatist Ewald Palmetshofer, a free rewriting of Shakespeare’s two-part history play “King Henry IV”. Palmetshofer wrote it as a commission for the Residenztheater in Munich, where it premiered on 22 January 2025 in a production directed by Alexander Eisenach. The text is written in a loosely rhythmic verse, calls for two female and six male roles and is represented by S. Fischer Theater & Medien.
Plot
After a successful coup, Heinrich Bolingbrock rules as a kind of king over a country shaken by crises; he is growing old, and no suitable successor is in sight. His son Harri prefers to spend his nights in Frau Flott’s container bar, drinking and partying with his close friend John Falstaff. When Harri receives a dubious offer from the centre of power, the unequal friendship is torn between personal bonds and political loyalty. The play moves Shakespeare’s material into a near, post-democratic future and asks whether love is even possible in such times.
Cultural significance
Critics received the premiere as a linguistically powerful, politically urgent Shakespeare update about power, autocracy and the gulf between those above and those below. Within a short time further productions followed, among them in Bonn, Oberhausen, Göttingen, at the Thalia Theater Hamburg, the Vienna Burgtheater and in Osnabrück.