Le Principesse
by Olga Bach — directed by Ersan Mondtag
World premiere: 13 November 2026
Teatro Garibaldi, Palermo
Venue: Teatro Garibaldi, Piazza Magione — Palermo
Curated by: Fondazione Studio Rizoma
Direction: Ersan Mondtag
Dramaturgy: Olga Bach
Cast: Frank Büttner, Maziar Firouzi, Ruth Kemna and Vittoria Salamone
Set design: Simone Mannino
Composition: Beni Brachtel
Live music (viola): Ruth Kemna Assistant director: Pierpaolo Arata
Four Princesses inhabit an abandoned theatre.
On 13 November 2026, Le Principesse by Olga Bach, directed by Ersan Mondtag, will inaugurate the reopening of Teatro Garibaldi in Palermo. This world premiere draws on the theatre’s own history and Shakespearean heritage to explore the present through a reflection on power, democracy and responsibility.
In the 1990s, Teatro Garibaldi hosted Carlo Cecchi’s legendary Shakespeare trilogy: a theatre stripped of ornament, direct and conversational, yet no less powerful. Le Principesse takes up this legacy and brings it into the present, placing Shakespeare’s Hamlet in dialogue with Machiavelli’s The Prince.
After the death of Princess Vittoria, her heir Maziar begins to question the circumstances of her death and suspects Frank, her closest collaborator. Like Hamlet confronting Claudius, he searches for a truth that continues to elude him. The dead Princess returns as a ghost, while the roles of victim and perpetrator continually overlap and shift.
Through a narrative that intertwines the Renaissance, Fascism and the present day, the play poses an urgent question: how can a democracy exercise power without adopting the methods of its enemies?
Hamlet’s doubt thus encounters Machiavelli’s political pragmatism. At a time marked by the return of right-wing populism, imperial ambitions and war, Le Principesse reflects on the fragility of the democratic order and on the tension between the ideals of a society and the need to act in times of crisis.
Featuring an Italian-German cast and deeply connected to the history of Teatro Garibaldi, Le Principesse also opens a new chapter in the theatre’s life: a place capable of bringing Palermo into dialogue with Europe and the Mediterranean, memory into dialogue with the present, and the local scene into conversation with the international one.
An abandoned theatre thus becomes a place in which to question power, its legacy, and what remains when those who wield it are gone.