Goethe Scenes

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What can still provoke in theatres today? Frank Castorf, director of the Volksbühne Berlin ('People's Stage of Berlin') is attempting this with the element of time – his version of Alexandre Dumas' Kean, or Genius and Passion (1836) takes five hours. His somewhat exhausting productions have made Castorf famous across the world. In October, the Volksbühne Berlin with Kean will be a guest of the most important Bosnian theatre festival, the MESS. The Sarajevo Goethe Institute has been supporting the festival for years by inviting suitable German theatre productions, and on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the festival this year the Goethe Institute is to be awarded a prize for its successful teamwork. Castorf's theatre deals with the connections between artistic identity, theatre and society as a whole, and the boulevard production concerning the actor Edmund Kean from England at around the time of 1800 is eminently suitable for this purpose. Dumas the Elder with his Kean portrayed an artist from the lower classes of society that lived for art, was celebrated by society's upper echelons only to be subsequently cast away by these. Castorf's piece has been transformed for contemporary theatre by Lothar Trolle's reworking of the text and by linking to the Hamlet Machine of Heiner Müller. The domestic and courtly world of Dumas, its class conflicts and today's era of casting shows: masks from now and from yesteryear are united. The Volksbühne will be presenting Kean on the 23rd October at the Sarajevo People's Theatre.