Die acht Oktavhefte

"Every human being carries a room within him. This fact can even be verified by hearing," Franz Kafka noted in 1916 "after two years of not writing" in a small school notebook in octavo format. Two sentences as if made for the Swiss theater director Thom Luz to create one of his musical works of stage art from them. Kafka's eight octavo notebooks collect diary entries, scraps of thoughts, draft letters and prose sketches, in which many traces of his famous stories can already be found. This material forms the narrative space of an evening of theater that surprisingly reassembles Kafka's mass of work between persecution and standstill, constant existential threat and bright wit of despair.

Thom Luz, who will direct at SchauSpielHaus Hamburg for the first time this season, "never ceases to amaze his audiences. His theater is one of fleeting phenomena, and thus one that allows time itself to be experienced. It is inhabited by ghosts, mists, flickering candles and, again and again, beguiling music. A theater that wrings light-footed magic from the cumbersome stage machinery and the old-fashioned piano," according to the jury statement of the Swiss Theater Prize, with which Thom Luz was honored in 2019. He has already been invited several times to the Berlin Theatertreffen with his works.

Motif: Rocket & Wink