Two found each other after waiting a long time for each other.

They live a friendly love based on conversation and trust, maybe not the most passionate thing you can imagine in a relationship.

The theater director Lisa Nielebock, born a good 170 years after the novel was published, thinks that Goethe's "Elective Affinities", this unusual novel from 1809, describes a "very modern, equal relationship".

Now, with so many years between its creation and its readers, the four-corner love story of Charlotte and Otto, Eduard and Ottilie feels like a precursor to auteur films, which deal with vastly different notions of love, conventions, and choices about when and how you feel guilty or free and when not.

Eva Maria Magel

Senior cultural editor of the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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It's about "a very modern couple who thinks nothing can happen to them because they are so open-minded," says Nielebock.

And then the super-GAU happens, against which Eduard and Charlotte cannot arrive with their enlightenment.

Love is told like an elemental force, an elemental catastrophe, says Nielebock.

She is now showing this catastrophe with only four actors, Marta Kizyma, Manja Kuhl, Torsten Flassig and Heiko Raulin, in the huge Great House of the Frankfurt Schauspiel.

As an intimate game, close to the audience, she says.

The text obviously fascinates Nielebock.

She didn't choose the material.

It was the Frankfurt director Anselm Weber who had asked for him, and Nielebock, who has worked with Weber for many years, from his stations in Essen via Bochum to Frankfurt, agreed.

Sometimes she suggests something, sometimes a subject comes from the theater, sometimes the choice of subject, as in her previous Frankfurt production "Siddhartha", arose from the wish that certain artists could work together, in this case Nielebock with the actress Jana Schulz.

The premiere was supposed to take place in November 2021

Nielebock's catalog raisonné lists great subjects, classics of theater literature and world literature in abundance.

She is convinced of the power of theater and what it can do based on literary texts.

"I generally like to talk about people from now on, even if they use a language that looks like a code, because classical language is not everyday language," she explains.

Since studying at the Folkwang University of the Arts, she has staged productions at German-language municipal and state theaters and began training younger people at an early age.

She has been a professor at her former university since 2014, a "dreamlike situation," she says: "Because both are mutually enriching.

It is good for my students that they have a professor who is in the middle of her professional life, it is very important for her to have this artistic awareness.

And vice versa, when I work with the students, I deal with the basic questions of theater making.”

She plans her absences from teaching very carefully. Nielebock is also a mother of two children, one of whom is disabled, so she decides very carefully what she does and doesn't do.

"You have to coordinate everything well, I produce one or two times at most in a season.

So very rarely, but all the better,” she says.

And all the more carefully she selects and works in dialogue with the actors.

The fact that the pandemic has thrown everything upside down with such a challenging subject as “Elective Affinities” takes her sportingly, but it shouldn’t have been easy to end a project in November 2021, right before the premiere, almost in shock and now, with only a few rehearsal days, "kissing awake" a production that could only be shown in-house during lockdown.

They have all progressed, become different, first in the intensive cooperation during the lockdown, then alone, afterwards.

Now the stage is set.

"Elective Affinities" premieres on April 14 at 7:30 p.m. at the Schauspiel Frankfurt, the next performance is on April 17 at 6 p.m.