Festival of World Theater will open on Friday, September 9th at 8pm with The Marriage of Marija Braun by famous German playwright Thomas Ostermeier. The play was adapted from a script by cult film director Reiner Werner Fassbinder and will be performed by artists from Berlin’s Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz theater. The play will be performed once again the next day, September 10th at 6pm.
Ostermeier is a regular guest of the festival and has had multiple of his modern interpretations of classic plays performed at Croatian National Theater, including Nora by Ibsen (2003), Hamlet and Othello by Shakespeare (2008/2011) and Death in Venice by Mann (2013).
The Marriage of Maria Braun is the first part of Fassbinder’s BRD trilogy (including Lola and The Longing of Veronica Voss) about post-war West Germany embodied through his female protagonists.
Festival of World Theater continues on September 20th with Time’s Journey Through a Room, an auteur project from Toshiki Okade performed by theater troupe chelfitsch. Okada, who is one of the key auteurs in contemporary Japanese theater, creates a world in which he confronts the living and the dead, exposing ‘the envy of the living towards the ones that died with hope’. Continuing his explorations of musical forms by intertwining original songs with voices of actors, Okada has collaborated with visual artist Tsuyoshi Hisakado in creating a sound box for the stage based on sounds recorded in live environments. The idea is to make the audiences experience the relations between invisible sounds, bodies, languages and spaces. The play will be performed twice on the same day, starting at 5pm and 9pm.
The festival will come to an end on September 23rd and 24th with two renditions of the play Tristesses (sorrows), starting at 8pm on both days. The project mixes music and theater performed by Das Fräulein and focuses on the relationship between power and sorrow. Using elements of a detective story and political comedy, the author Anne-Cécile Vandalem uses humor to explore one of the scariest political tactics today: crowd manipulation through sorrow. Using a filmic scene, she exploits the stage to shine a light on the power of media and the way propaganda works, both in the open and in the shadows, secretly. Tristesses is a part of the auteur’s diptych about sorrow that also includes a video installation Still to Sad to Tell You.
Tickets can be bought HERE.
