5th International Monodrama Festival THESPIS
10 to 17 November 2006 Kiel GERMANY

Saturday, November 11 | 21:00 | Theater im Werftpark


LENZ
performed by Klaus-Peter Bülz
(Italy/Germany)

written by Georg Büchner

directed by Reinhard Auer; stage design by Werner Weiskopf; costumes by Michela Dall'Ara; light design by Roberto Morello


”Lenz”, Georg Büchner's visionary exploration of an 18th century playwright's descent into madness, has been called the inception of European modernist prose. Published posthumously in 1839, ”Lenz” is a taut case study of three weeks in the life of a schizophrenic, perhaps the first third-person text ever to be written from the "inside" of insanity. Partially based on the memoir of an Alsatian pastor describing Lenz's stay with him in 1778, Büchner's text moves well beyond its source by the rapt and virtually autistic attention it brings to the details of the natural world, whose landscapes prefigure those of Cézanne or Van Gogh. At his death at the age of 23 in 1837, Georg Büchner also left behind ”Leonce and Lena”, ”Woyzeck”, and ”Danton's Death” - psychologically and politically acute plays well ahead of their time.

“Lenz”, as performed at THESPIS, was first staged at Free Theatre Bozen in April 2005. Its director, Reinhard Auer said about his approach to the show: ”We have decided to leave the structure of the story as it was. Rather than ‘dramatise' the text, we let the contents be seen directly ‘out of the core of the matter'.” (...) In all this, we rely on only one actor, on his imagination and discipline. (...) We created stage text out of Büchner's prose and that way we could fully experience its magic, power, calm, storm and stress and inscrutable affinity.”

Klaus-Peter Bülz was born 1954 in Regensburg. He resides in Munich and has worked as free-lance actor since 1979. Since 1994 he is affiliated with Free Theatre Bozen, where also the former version of ”Lenz” was produced in 1994. Reinhard Auer's production followed in 2005. Auer was manager at Jura-Soyfer-Theater in Vienna until 1992 and since then he has worked internationally as free-lance director - in Leipzig, Cottbus, Hannover, Shanghai, Timisoara (Romania) and other places.


Language: German
Length: 70 minutes

Produced at Free Theatre Bozen

German premiere

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