The Swiss director Christoph Marthaler is a musicologist. He studied under Jacques Lecoq in France in the sixties. Following this he started to direct a patchwork of theatre, song and music. Accompanied by his regular set designer Anna Viebrock, he always creates a unique world, the theatre of the antihero. 'Glaube Liebe Hoffnung' is his fourth staging of a play by Ödön von Horváth. This Hungarian author lived and worked in Germany between the wars. In his writings he criticises the rise of fascism.
In the 1932 play 'Glaube Liebe Hoffnung', he sketches a sad social scene during the depression. A young woman falls out of the social safety net. Driven to despair, she goes into a fatal decline. Any attempt to save her ultimately accelerates her demise. Von Horváth described this play as 'a little dance of death'. He warns us of our penchant for kitsch and false sentiment, and indeed the masochistic kick we get from compassion in times of crisis.