Rom - Schedule, Program & Tickets

Rom

Director Luk Perceval is tackling a new, monumental Shakespearean undertaking 25 years after his spectacular BATTLES!, the legendary twelve-hour “Shakespeare Madness” (Die Zeit) at the Salzburg Festival, which brought together the eight royal dramas of the Wars of the Roses into one work: Shakespeare's Roman tragedies merged into a famous and complex work.

“ROM DOESN’T KNOW HIMSELF!”

The various tragedies are connected by a specific theme: the use of power. How can the omnipresent concept of power be defined? Is power everywhere where people are? To what extent can the exercise of power be viewed positively? At what point does power corrupt those who are able to wield it? Who gives away power anyway? Or is it only achieved?

The author Julia Jost describes the status of her work in spring 2023 - at the end of the first research and rehearsal phase with the ensemble - as follows: “I understand the process we are all in right now as sampling. We cut out passages and put them somewhere else, I use additional lines, etc. by Elias Canetti, Ingeborg Bachmann, Herta Müller, Plutarch, Lenin, Hannah Arendt and Thomas Hobbes and intersect them with the Shakespeare text. At the same time, these sampled excerpts are overwritten, which means that I adapt these thoughts to the overall text with my own words, adding, subtracting, replacing the words and working on the overall rhythm. In the end, the text of the piece will be like a newly primed painting: the old shimmers through and blends into a new picture.”

Luk Perceval sees the bringing together of the material as, above all, a single, big story about people's very own instinct to want to survive, to continue to exist in a society that is divided into hunters and hunted. Shakespeare's characters, who often function as symbols, metaphors or even archetypes, lead to insights into human nature through conflicts, paradoxes and contradictions. In order not to die, there is always a merciless attempt to be one of the winners.

Coriolanus is a ruler who flaunts his lack of corruption with iron sternness, but at the same time is just as unwaveringly conservative towards the people and transforms himself into an autocrat. Julius Caesar rules with the help of bribery, abuse of power and despotism - and is murdered for it. The coup is followed by civil wars, and a disunited triumvirate uses rhetorical skill to maintain its own power. Self-repeating strivings for power and their escalation into brute force, slaughter, massacres, oppression, hunger and flight.

Subject to change.
28
Su 19:00
Rom