Скачать или смотреть Romanticism: A performance based on Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"

The Onassis Cultural Centre, Athens [GR]
18 March - 5 April 2015

Translated by Maria Angelidou
Directed by Themelis Glynatsis
Dramaturgy: Eleni Triantafyllopoulou
Stage design by Adrianos Zacharias
Costumes by Margarita Dosoula
Music by Yiorgos Poulios
Light design by Melina Mascha
Video design by Olga Brouma

Performed by Thanasis Dovris, Nestor Kopsidas, Alexandra Delitheou, Sotiris Tsakomidis, Christos Kechris, Aspasia Kralli, Sofianna Theofanous and Ieoronimos Kaletsanos.

Piano: Michalis Papapetrou

So was Adolf Hitler a romantic? Or, put another way, might the moral and intellectual destabilization of the 19th century have fed innately into the seemingly irresistible rise of Nazism? These are the sort of questions tackled by the stage version of Hermann Broch’s emblematic trio of novels, The Sleepwalkers (1932), a compelling work which chronicles the three European decades (1888-1918) separating the decline of Romanticism from World War One and Fascism.

A proponent of an impassioned and profoundly meditative theatre, the young and rapidly up-and-coming director Themelis Glynatsis, one of the outstanding voices of contemporary Greek theatre, takes on the first novel in Broch’s trilogy. Espousing a totally new directorial idiom far from the mimicry of the post-modern and of laboured abstraction, Glynatsis promises audiences a poetic production, a theatrical rite of initiation set to the hollow thud of a world collapsing—the world of 1888 which seems so disturbingly familiar to us today.

A fine cast of veterans and relative newcomers bring to life the story of the young Joachim von Pasenow, who is forced into a career in the army by his family, where he espouses the absolutist and nationalist ideals of Prussian militarism, and sleepwalks through a world “ruled by a sort of emotional inertness” like some Faustian antihero…