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Theater: Fassbinder in three countries

VeronikaVossHamburgAs in previous months, April sees several works by Rainer Werner Fassbinder being staged in European theaters. In the Gaußstraße, the smaller stage attached to Hamburg’s Thalia Theater, a theater adaptation of VERONIKA VOSS has been running since February 2014, in which Bastian Kraft directs Victoria von Trauttmannsdorff as a formerly popular film star trying unsuccessfully to make a comeback in post-war West Germany. High on morphine, she strolls through a labyrinth of mirrors and video screens. This production is also notable for the fact that, in contrast to Fassbinder’s other popular films, Veronika Voss, the second last film he directed, is seldom seen in a stage adaptation.

Fassbinder was still a young man when he wrote the play WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS, but it was not until after his death that the work was premiered. Michael Freckles has now brought it to the stage in the Baumstrasse cultural center in Athens. The story centers on Franz, a young man who leaves his fiancée to enter into a destructively dependent relationship with an older man. Since being filmed in 2000 by François Ozon, the play has been proving highly popular again in the theater.

BREMEN FREEDOM, which is currently running at the Kladno Theater in the Czech Republic, is a play that Fassbinder himself also filmed. The plot is based on the story of Gesche Gottfried, who poisoned several people with arsenic at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was publically executed following his exposure in 1831. Fassbinder’s interest in this story lies above all in the social pressure that drives Gottfried to these acts.

More information:

VERONIKA VOSS

Film information

Website of  the Thalia Theater in Hamburg

Next performances:

Fri, 17 April 2015, 8 p.m.
Tues, 21 April 2015, 8 p.m.

WATER DROPS ON BURNING ROCKS

Baumstrasse cultural center website

Next performances:

Mon, 6 April 2015, 9:30 p.m.
Tues, 7 April 2015, 9:30 p.m.

BREMEN FREEDOM

Film information

Kladno Theater website

Next performances:

Tues, 28 April 2015, 7:30 p.m.
Fri, 29 May 2015, 6 p.m.

Photos: DIE SEHNSUCHT DER VERONIKA VOSS, © Krafft Angerer

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