Vier Frauen und ein Dichterfürst
By Walter Hesse
Bad air in the Goethe household: the poet trying to finish Faust while four women interrupt him.
In 14 days
16 September 2026 · 20:00 Uhr
About Vier Frauen und ein Dichterfürst
The house calls it a domestic humoresque, and the joke is that the greatest German poem is being written in a house where nobody will leave the author alone. Goethe wants to get on with Faust. The cook wants a decision about frog legs. The actress Caroline Jagemann wants a dog on stage. Christiane, who has had a drink, wants to talk about Frau von Stein. A fourth woman arrives with the town's gossip. Three actors play all of it in the vaults, and it works because every interruption is the sort of thing the letters and diaries of that household are actually full of.
Performances
Also on stage here
Where
Lucas-Cranach-Haus, Markt 11/12, 99423 Weimar
Organiser
Theater im Gewölbe
Facts checked against the organiser on 29 August 2026
Places and people
Historical figures
1749–1832 • writer • statesman • naturalist
The Dichterfürst of the title, trying and failing to get an afternoon's work done on Faust.
1765–1816 • companion • wife of Goethe
She is one of the four, and the evening gives her the complaint about Frau von Stein.
1742–1827 • lady-in-waiting • author
Not on stage, but the subject Christiane raises — the other woman in the house's long argument.
1777–1848 • actress • singer
One of the four interruptions: the actress, arriving to argue about putting a dog on the stage.
Historical periods
The domestic underside of the classical decades, played for comedy.
For roughly sixty years a duchy of a few thousand people held the centre of German literature, because its ruler kept inviting writers to live there and then gave them jobs. That is the whole mechanism, and it ran from Goethe's arrival in 1775 to his death in 1832.