Bunbury. Being serious is everything!

Venue: Chamber - To escape from their social obligations and incognito their secret wishes and longings — their true self? — Being able to live out, the two dandies Algernon and Jack lead a double life. Algernon invents a sickly friend named Bunbury, who has to be visited regularly in the countryside, while Jack pretends to take care of his easy-going brother Ernst so that he can travel to the city as often as possible. There he leads a dissolute life as the same Ernst, while on his country estate he sets the morally inviolable example for his ward Cecily. She in turn — just like Algernon's cousin Gwendolen, whom Jack recruits during his visits to the city — has set her mind to marry only a man named Ernst. When Algernon appears on the country estate in the role of Jack's supposed brother Ernst, the comic entanglements take their course.

Bunbury (originally: The Importance of Being Earnest) is Oscar Wilde's most famous comedy — and at the same time his last: Shortly after the premiere, he was sentenced to two years in prison with heavy physical labor in 1895 as part of a public lawsuit for homosexual acts. Ruined in health, financially and socially, the author died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde's own double life, which, in contrast to that of its protagonists, did not come to a happy end, is invariably written into this perfectly built comedy from today's perspective.

In the fast-paced version by director Claudia Bossard, Oscar Wilde's comedy riddled with language humor becomes queer theatre fun, which not only fluidizes the language boundaries between German and English in metropolitan society talk, but also frees gender and identity images from their Victorian social corset in a playful whirlwind.

In 2023, the production was awarded the Nestroy Theatre Prize for Best National Performance.