About the work
Vampire’s Mountain is a piece of image-based theatre by the French director and stage designer Philippe Quesne, who is responsible for concept, direction, set and costumes. It was Quesne’s first work at the Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg and brought members of his company Vivarium Studio together with the Hamburg ensemble; it premiered on the main stage in October 2025.
Plot
Seven dishevelled vampires climb up from beneath the stage into a mountain landscape with a spruce forest, disappear into an upright coffin and play with skis, ladders and the bones of lost mountaineers as if they were toys. The forest gives way to a snowy mountain panorama, glaciers collapse, and in the end only the bare, harshly lit stage remains as the vampires turn into bats. There is little dialogue; organ, flute, piano, songs and a Bach cantata carry the evening, and Lord Byron’s poem Darkness from the Year Without a Summer of 1816 sets the tone.
Cultural significance
Quesne uses the vampire myth to tell of the end of the world in the age of climate crisis, playing with motifs from Romanticism, literature and film up to Kubrick’s The Shining. Critics described the evening as a melancholy, comic and absurd farewell to earthly existence; some found it lacking in urgency.