bijoux de Kant

Based on Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther

 

“The whole thing is an explosive device”, Goethe would confess in later life about the novel he wrote in his youth which, extolling young Werther’s doomed love for the ‘forbidden’ Lotte, would win both the novel and its author overnight fame throughout Europe. Inspired in part by a doomed romance of his own and in part by the tragic suicide of one of his circle, the novel was the means by which the author cast off the ring of melancholy then tightening around his own life. As he admitted in Poetr y and Truth, his autobiography of 1809, Werther was more than a means of acquiring fame: Goethe and Werther were “two people in one, one of whom died and the other of whom stayed alive to write the other’s tale”. The author’s ambivalence towards the work that made his name (comparable to the ambivalence lovers can feel for the object of their passion) lies at the heart of the production by the newly-formed bijoux de Kant company.
 

The director and visual artist Yannis Scourletis and the composer Kostas Dalakouras return to the scene of the (romantic) crime they so love (having delighted Athens audiences last year with the darkly ironic Graveyard Café Band / In Extremis which featured texts by Greek Neoromantic poets) and present a ‘show’ for three actors which translates the contradictions and rifts that mark Goethe’s interactions with Werther, and Werther’s with his beloved, on-stage in all their complexity. With the original music and moving images (recorded and live projections) making a significant contribution to the proceedings, the production becomes a dizzying game of reflections which dissolves the distinction between the real and the imaginary, the body and the spectre, life and death.