The actor and Iffland Ring holder Jens Harzer, who will appear in the world premiere of Peter Handke’s Schnee von gestern, Schnee von morgen (Snows of Yesteryear, Snows of Tomorrow), made his debut at the Berliner Ensemble in autumn 2025 with De Profundis. Together with director Oliver Reese, Harzer developed a monologue that plunges the audience into the depths of Oscar Wilde’s life – a powerfully eloquent attempt to reclaim life through art.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years in prison: for provoking society, for flouting its con­ventions, for loving men openly and refusing to hide in the shadows. His trial was meant to serve as a lesson – less a punishment for a crime than a judgement on his very way of being, on his fierce craving for freedom and acceptance. His long letter from prison to Lord Alfred ‘Bosie’ Douglas, later published under the title ‘De Profundis‘, is the final outcry of a broken but unbowed spirit: the testimony of a man who has spent his life testing the limits of respectability and, in the end, lost everything. With extraordinary literary mastery, Wilde writes of con­tempt and loneliness, of pride and pain – and of a society that cannot tolerate what it cannot understand.