Matthias Brandt &
Jens Thomas:
Die Bergwerke zu Falun
('The Mines of Falun')
It's the stuff of a love that ends in tragedy: The Mines of Falun is one of the numerous literary retellings of the saga of the sailor Elis Fröbom, who reluctantly seeks his fortune in the mines and finds his great love in the miner's daughter Ulla. However, the mountain ghost forces Elis to decide between love on Earth or a life with the mountain queen and legendary riches.
With his stories, the literary outsider E. T. A. Hoffmann, deeply rooted in Romanticism, unlocked imaginary worlds. In contrast to his drama The Mines of Falun, where psychoanalysis plays a major role, E. T. A. Hoffmann's interpretation of the saga of Elis Fröbom and his bride Ulla equals a journey through a night of reality loss that ends with an awakening in eternal love.
After their celebrated programmes Dracula, Psycho, and Raumpatrouille & Memory Boy, the actor Matthias Brandt and the pianist Jens Thomas return to the stage of the Schinkel Church with their latest E.T.A. Hoffmann evening.
From the mid-1980s onwards, the actor and author Matthias Brandt has been a member of various theatre ensembles, most recently at the Schauspielhaus Zurich and the Schauspielhaus Bochum. Since 2000, he has worked mainly in TV and film, and has won numerous awards. He is best-known for his performances as the Munich-based inspector in the TV crime series Polizeiruf 110, and the character of August Benda he played in Babylon Berlin. He has also been touring with the musician Jens Thomas with their collages of words and music for the past few years. His first book, the volume of short stories Raumpatrouille, was published in 2016; his debut novel Blackbird followed in 2019.
Jens Thomas studied jazz piano at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater Hamburg, and has toured extensively throughout Germany and Europe since 1996. He has also performed live in various theatre productions since 2003, and continues to do so, for example at the Thalia Theatre in Hamburg, at the NT Gent, at the Münchner Kammerspiele, the Burgtheater in Vienna and at the Schauspielhaus Bochum. In 2010, he composed the music for TV channel NDR's documentary Tod auf dem Hochsitz by Michael Heuer, and in 2020, the score for the episode entitled Ich hab im Traum geweinet of the long-running TV crime series Tatort, directed by Jan Bonny. He released his album Memory Boy in 2016, and Jens Thomas in 2020.
