The Golden Dragon
A Reading of Roland Schimmelpfenning's landmark play followed by a conversation between the playwright and Pragya Tiwari.
Regarded as one of the most prolific and heralded dramatists in Europe, Roland Schimmelpfennig, the Berlin-based playwright, author and director meets his Indian audience for the first time in a virtual meeting, in collaboration with the International Literature Festival, Tata Literature Live! 2020.
The session will start with introduction of the speaker and the chair which will be followed by the performance of The Golden Dragon, followed by a conversation between Mr. Roland Schimmelpfennig and Ms.Tiwari and a Q & A round.
The session will be viewable on all the Tata Literature Live! handles, including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and the festival website, www.tatalitlive.in
About Roland Schimmelpfennig
Roland Schimmelpfennig, born 1967, is one of the most performed contemporary playwrights internationally. He worked as a journalist in Istanbul and was engaged at the Munich Kammerspiele after studying directing at the Otto Falckenberg School. Since 1996 Roland Schimmelpfennig has been working as a freelance author. His plays are performed with great success in over 40 countries worldwide from Vienna’s Burgtheater to Tokyo's National Theatre and within India. In 2016, his first novel "On a cold, clear January morning at the beginning of the 21st century" was published and which was shortlisted for the Leipzig Book Fair Prize. Up to now he has written three dozen stage and radio plays.
His plays have been translated into 20 languages. In the summer of 2010, he was awarded the Mülheimer Dramatikerpreis, regarded as the highest honour for a playwright in the German language. Previous winners include Nobel laureate Elfriede Jelinek and East German playwright Heiner Müller.
Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan Mumbai has collaborated with Mr. Schimmelpfennig for a translation project “Junge deutsche Dramatik in südasiatischen Sprachen” in which his eight plays will be translated into various south Asian languages, along with other contemporary German playwrights.
Prizes and Awards:
- Else-Lasker-Schüler-Preis for "Fisch um Fisch" (1997)
- Fördergabe des Schiller-Gedächtnispreises von Baden-Württemberg (1998)
- Einladung zu den Mülheimer Theatertagen 2000, 2001 und 2002
- Nestroy Prize 2002 as best young author
- Invitation to the Mülheim Theatre Days 2003 for his play Vorher/Nachher ("Before/After")
- Invitation to Stücke 2004 at the Mülheim Theatertage
- Invitation to the Mülheim Theatre Days 2005 for his playDie Frau von früher" (i.e."The Woman from the Past")
- Invitation to the Mülheim Theatre Days 2009 for his play Hier und Jetzt (i.e. "Here and Now")
- Nestroy Prize for the best play (Besuch bei dem Vater, i.e. "Visit at the Father") 2009
- Else-Lasker-Schüler-Prize 2010
- Invitation to and prize at the 2010 Mülheim Theatertage with The Golden Dragon
- The Golden Dragon was chosen as play of the year in the 2010 Theater Heute yearbook critics survey
Der goldene Drache (The Golden Dragon)
The play centres around The Golden Dragon, a Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai restaurant that does a good trade selling local residents its Asian fast food to take away as well.
It is here, between hissing gas cookers in the cramped kitchen, that a young Chinese man without a residence permit has an incisor that is tormenting him pulled out with a wrench. This tooth accidentally lands in the Thai soup, in which it finds its way into the mouth of a stewardess, one of the restaurant's regulars.
And then someone tells the story of the hungry cricket who becomes the victim of the business-like ant one winter. Who is ill-treated the whole dark winter long by the other ants without noticing it has actually been spring for some time.
While the fate of the little Asian girl who runs into the arms of the corner shop owner's drunken mate just as she is leaving her tiny, dark room seems painfully familiar. He only wants to taste a little of her foreignness just this once. Unfortunately, the way he goes about it is rather careless. Something so delicate easily gets broken. And when the young Chinese man bleeds to death after the operation with the wrench, he is wrapped up in a large dragon carpet and thrown into the river. From there, he finally floats home, to China. Unfortunately, he is dead and has not brought his sister back with him, although he had said it was her he was going abroad to find.
Roland Schimmelpfennig looks at the things that happen in and around the Golden Dragon from the most varied perspectives. Each pattern of behaviour is given new nuances by an ingenious twist: men are played by women, women by men, young characters by old actors and old characters by young actors. The results are poetic, brutal, mysterious and touching.
(Fischerverlag, Theater und Medien)
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