Orlando will open the German Theater Festival in Prague
This year, the Prague German Language Theater Festival will also invite spectators to the cinema. Features several film adaptations of plays. Ensembles from Hanover, Hamburg, Cologne, Vienna and Berlin will come with classic productions. The festival, which features theater from German-speaking countries, will begin production on 15 November Orlando from Staatstheater Hannover.
“It was not a matter of course to get German-language theaters. It has not been clear for a long time whether circumstances will allow hosting in the classic form to take place. In the end, all the theaters cooperated in such a way that we were afraid whether we would have money for all the originally invited ensembles. Fortunately, it turned out well, “Jitka Jílková, the emeritus director of the festival, told reporters on Thursday, referring to the growing pandemic, who handed over the management to the director of the Na Zábradlí Theater, Petr Štědroň, during the past year. Jílková also devotes herself to the dramaturgy of the festival.
The first two evenings of the festival will belong to the production Orlando directed by British director Lily Sykes. She considers Virginia Woolf’s novel about an ageless nobleman who walks through the centuries and becomes a poet, princess, mistress, freelance artist and single mother in the 20th century to be a masterpiece of literary modernity. German actress Corinna Harfouch will play the main role in the production.
The festival regularly participates in the creation of a Czech-German theater project. This year it is a collaboration with the Na Zábradlí Theater in Prague for the production of a Czech performance of a text by Peter Handke Zdeněk Adamec – One stage directed by Dušan David Pařízek. Handke wrote a play about a young man who burned himself at the National Museum in Prague in March 2003 in protest of the poor state of society.
In addition to stone theaters, spectators can go to the theater this year as well. The organizers will bring, for example, the processing of the dramatic text by Ewald Palmetshofer Edward II. I am love. Directed by Pinar Karabulutová, the production was created as a film about six 30-minute episodes shot with actors from the Cologne drama. The Austrian playwright Palmetshofer rewrote the story of the apostate monarch, shifting the conflicts of political figures exclusively to the private sphere.
Another theater in the cinema will be provided by one of the most prominent groups of the independent documentary theater Rimini Protokoll, which is also known to Czech audiences. Three of her projects will be presented in Prague this year. The first of these, the Conference of the Absent, deals with the consequences of globalization, the installation Feast of Food aims to force viewers to reflect on the apparent obviousness that food is already. The third contribution is called Temple du présent. An octopus solo and he wants to ask how one can understand an animal that attributes intelligence that is fundamentally different from its own, and how to establish a relationship with nature without one’s appropriation.