Open rehearsal: „Der Sturm / Das Dämmern der Welt“

Overthrown by adversaries around his own brother, Prospero, the former Duke of Milan, is driven to an island. There he meets Caliban and Ariel, from whom he snatches their land and makes them his subjects. He seeks revenge and unleashes a devastating storm to strand his enemies on the shores of the island.

House director Jan-Christoph Gockel interweaves Shakespeare’s play with Werner Herzog’s new novel “The Dawn of the World”. In it, Herzog tells the story of the soldier Hiroo Onoda, who continues to fight the Second World War on an island for 29 years. He considers all the news that the war is over to be fakes. But one day, just as Prospero takes off his magic cloak, he must return to a world that has gone on without him. Magic here is the naked struggle for survival and to maintain a contract whose validity has expired.

Jan-Christoph Gockel presents Shakespeare’s cyclical story of power, submission and resistance and Herzog’s literary monument to a senseless war in a spectacular aesthetic with puppets by Michael Pietsch.

“The truth is that the war has never stopped.”