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14.11.04 | 18:00 | Pumpe
ECCE HOMO - Poland
By Friedrich Nietzsche

With: Janusz Stolarski
Director: Janusz Stolarski
Cooperation: Bogumil Gauden
Translation into Polish: Leopold Staff
Duration: approx. 45 min.
Language: Polish

When he presented Jesus to the Jews demanding his crucifixion, Pontius Pilate cried Ecce homo (Behold the man). These words came to signify a type of devotional image that depicts Jesus after the scourging, crowned with a wreath of thorns, and with his face typically gaunt and drawn as he goes to his death.
In late 1888, only weeks before his final collapse into madness, Friedrich Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce homo remains one of the most intriguing yet bizarre examples of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work, Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome – Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ – and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his “forthcoming revelation of all values”. Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche’s main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.
Polish actor/director Janusz Stolarski has transformed Nietzsche’s text into a radical monologue, in which the contemporary audience can recognize themselves: the decline of values and the endless battle of emotion and reason have always been and still are important issues. The intensity of the play, its humor and intelligent irony made Stolarski’s Nietzsche adaptation the winner of several international theatre awards.