WARTEN AUF PLATONOW

WAITING FOR PLATONOV
by Thom Luz based on motifs by Anton Chekhov

Age recommendation: from 14 years

2 hours 25 minutes
1 intermission

"A little piano strums in your chest. Can't you hear it?"

Chekhov's humor, wrote Vladimir Nabokov, was incomparable and could therefore only be described as specifically Chekhovian:

"For him, things were funny and sad at the same time, but you only saw the sad if you also saw the funny, because the two were connected."

His texts were imbued with his kindness of heart and a "slightly iridescent mist of words", all his words hovered in the same twilight, "a color between that of an old fence and that of a low-hanging cloud".

Chekhov's texts, first and foremost his fragmentary youthful work "Platonov", are the starting point for a new musical theater evening by in-house director Thom Luz. He brings together a society that seeks to hear the melody of the joys and horrors of the future in the songs of a bygone era. The open question of whether the people in it actually have any room for maneuver or are just individual notes in a symphony by the great composer Nature does not stop them from trying out their individual harmonies and dissonances.

"You can also compare the way Chekhov's texts work with the instruction manual for Hupfeld's self-playing pianos from 1926: Pull this long piece of paper through that wooden box and hear the ghosts sing - songs of yesterday's world. Where there is a hole in the paper, a note will sound later. From now on, you no longer have to play the piano yourself if you want to dream about your failed love stories. This technology will soon be as obsolete as you are. Buy on credit today! Guarantee: The piano will continue to play until it is repossessed. When it gets boring: Start all over again. The key to happiness lies in the unchanged repetition of all your mistakes." Thom Luz

ARTISTIC DIRECTION

Production, stage and sound design Thom Luz
Musical direction Mathias Weibel
Costumes and lighting Tina Bleuler
Lighting Verena Mayr
Choreography Javier Rodríguez Cobos
Dramaturgy Katrin Michaels