Volksbühne Am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz - Frank Castorf

Nord
by Louis-Ferdinand Céline

An enfant terrible of the East German scene, Frank Castorf took over as artistic director of Berlin’s Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) after the Wall came down.


Under Castorf, this historic theatre built in 1914 as a result of grassroots demands for a people’s theatre was to acquire a reputation as Germany’s most radical company, staging productions by important directors in which experiment was combined with classic skill, eccentricity with accessibility to the general public. Fragmentation, playful anachronisms and improvised shots are all core elements of the theatrical idiom of the innovative German director who would take on the contentious Frenchman, Céline (1894-1961).


In Nord (1960), Part 1 of Céline’s German trilogy, the author of Journey to the Edge of Night, describes his flight from persecution for collaboration (between 1936-1941 he wrote several anti-Semitic and pro-national socialist pamphlets) from France through a Germany in flames and on the point of collapse towards Denmark in 1944-45.  He witnesses how the pleasant life of the world’s then still important men amidst the bombardments turns into open decadence and hysteria, while the war brings the amalgam of European prisoners of war, collaborators on the flight and homeless refugees to the point of boil… A much-anticipated production!


In German with Greek surtitles.


A production by Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz in co-production with Wiener Festwochen, Festival d’Avignon, Athens Festival.