My Snow Queen A fairytale based on the work of Hans Christian Andersen
Director, adaptation:
Set, Costumes:
Bert Neumann
Lighting:
Lothar Baumgarte
Dramaturgy:
Jutta Wangemann
With:
Herbert Fritsch, Irina Kastrinidis, Birgit Minichmayr, Alexander Scheer, Jeanette Spassova, Volker Spengler
Opening night:
8. October
Start:
7:30 pm
Duration:
approx. 2 hours and 40 min, no interval
Performance:
9. October
Start:
7:30 pm
Duration:
approx. 2 hours and 40 min, no interval
Venue:
Introduction:
8., 9. October
The introduction begins 45 minutes prior to the start of the event.
Price:
Category A
40 €
Category B
30 €
Category C
20 €
Like the theatre, fairytales are suspected of being romantic. When seen on stage they inevitably fail to convince. We neither believe that a kettle can speak nor an actor pretending to be a kettle. What interests the theatre, and Frank Castorf's theatre in particular, are the transitions: the moments when Dostoevsky's humans turn into Andersen's characters or vice versa, when Herbert Fritsch becomes a shirt-collar or Volker Spengler becomes an iron; the moments when fairy-tales become drama. Fairy-tales' underlying structural principles are as different from those of the theatre as an iron is from an actor. The transition becomes interesting, however, if its inevitable failure results in the emergence of something new. This created Other is no less fabulous if it is poetic, in the sense of Novalis' Romantic maxim, "poetry is what truly is absolutely genuine".
"We are living in a post-scientific age in which deliberation and intuition are regaining importance. I am interested in the success of Harry Potter in a world shaped by Bill Gates. This world is yearning for fairy-tales", says Frank Castorf, who will be staging his first fairy-tale in celebration of the bicentenary of Hans Christian Andersen’s birth.
In his fairy-tales, Andersen drew on his own experiences of hardship and a fundamental sense of loneliness. He succeeded in transforming his own feelings of unease with the world into the images of dreams and nightmares familiar to all of us today. His numerous autobiographical writings, travel stories, diaries and silhouettes were all attempts to communicate with a world which, whilst feting him as a story-teller, ignored him as a person and offered him nowhere to call home.
The tension between longing and lack of fulfilment was part of Andersen's life. The way his fairy-tales condense and transform this coincides with our own enduring, residually romantic awareness of something missing. "Every person today, without exception, feels too little loved" (Adorno).
For adults; for children only if accompanied by their legal guardian.
Produced by the Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz, Berlin in co-production with the Hans Christian Andersen 2005 Foundation and the Théâtre MC93 Bobigny