What relevance does Goethe's emotional epistolary novel about the lovesick Werther still have in the age of Facebook, Twitter and" I-Phone" culture?
Philipp Hochmair tells Werther's story using the original text from her personal, contemporary perspective. A performance that moves between reading, monodrama and performance. An invitation to what is probably the most famous first-person trip in German literature.
Werther!" has been on a successful tour since 1997. A youthful stroke of genius by the two theater artists. The low-budget production made it from the classroom in Nuremberg to the Burgtheater in Vienna, on tour abroad from Moscow to Bogotá.
Philipp Hochmair begins reading aloud from Goethe's epistolary novel, delving into Werther's states in front of a camera. A young man, away from home for the first time, plunges into an impossible love story, observing and enjoying his emotional world. His video projections become a road movie, a trap for his vanity. An introspection on the soul of an unhappy man, on the mechanisms of self-destruction.
An invitation to what is probably the most famous ego trip in German literature.
"Goethe's Werther was written in just a few weeks and became the book of the hour overnight. The urgent, pressing, necessary nature of this text has lost none of its intensity some 250 years later. In keeping with its validity today, we have also placed it musically in a new context, which at the same time underscores its timelessness."
(Philipp Hochmair)
Additional information
Participating artists
Philipp Hochmair
