A tragicomedy by William Shakespeare
Translated and directed by: Vera Sturm
French translation and adaptation:Irène Kuhn et Pierre Deshusses
Set: Vincent Callara
Starring: Norbert Kentrup, Barbara Kratz and Dagmar Papula
This Shakespeare play about boundless human love and similarly boundless human hate was written between 1605 and 1608. It tackles tough topics and crosses at times into the realm of the grotesque, hesitating between tragedy and comedy. The translator and director of the play, Vera Sturm, has incorporated in her version of the text elements from one of the sources Shakespeare may have used, the play with the same title by the Greek playwright Lukian. Mercury, the messenger of the Greek gods, for example, plays a part in this play.
Schlegel and Schiller both praised Shakespeare´s Timon of Athens for its truthfulness and life wisdom but nevertheless the play was for a long time considered to be unplayable. SHAKESPEARE and PARTNER though show that the play is actually highly playable, if one sticks strictly to the techniques used at The Globe, the most important Shakespeare stage in Elizabethan times. One of these techniques is the deconstruction of the Fourth Wall, an inseparable part of the Shakespearean set.
In this version of the play the director has put together, from a horde of supporting characters, the figures Flavius and Apemantus to create the single character of the servant Apemantus. Apemantus is at Timon’s side both in good and bad times. He’s a sad clown and together with his master reminds us of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
Interaction with the audience substitutes the many minor characters while Mercury, with his alienated, ironic features of a side spectator and commentator, sets things in motion.
