Storm
© Wonge Bergmann

One year ago Needcompany entered into an association with the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Several projects have been completed with this prestigious company, which has produced such directors as Christoph Marthaler and Peter Zadek. First there was the coproduction of Needcompany’s King Lear, then the Vagina Monologue, directed by Viviane De Muynck, a full-time member of Needcompany, and now there is Ein Sturm, directed by Jan Lauwers. Several members of the Schauspielhaus company appear in this play alongside the Needcompany actor Gonzalo Cunill.

An international tour of Ein Sturm is planned, naturally including Belgium.

When Prospero throws out his books at the end of The Tempest, he says, ‘Despite all the wisdom and knowledge our civilisation has brought us, we have learned nothing’

In the twentieth century God lost out to an absolute belief in the future. The ‘future-god’ created atomic energy, perfect fighting machines and more than 400 wars since World War Two. The ‘future-god’ took some telling blows from exploding nuclear power stations and supertankers that broke their backs, and then he was replaced by an absolute belief in muddled notions like fundamentalism and ethnic purity, resulting in even more hatred and killing. The ghastliest expression of this hatred, because of its professional efficiency, was the genocide of the Jews.

The hugest and most brutal was the massacre of more than 70 million Indians in the mid-16th century, the period when Shakespeare wrote The Tempest. Shakespeare’s strength lies chiefly in his refusal to adopt a moral point of view as an artist. He leaves that to the spectator. However, it appears from Prospero’s closing monologue that as a humanist, Shakespeare was hugely disappointed.
At the time I started on my adaptation of The Tempest, 37% of the population of the village of my birth, Hoboken, voted for a neo-fascist party and its leader won the most preferential votes in Belgium. ‘We shall never learn anything from history’ is a cliché as big as a concentration camp.
(Jan Lauwers)

 

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One year ago Needcompany entered into an association with the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg. Several projects have been completed with this prestigious company, which has produced such directors as Christoph Marthaler and Peter Zadek. First there was the coproduction of Needcompany’s King Lear, then the Vagina Monologue, directed by Viviane De Muynck, a full-time member of Needcompany, and now there is Ein Sturm, directed by Jan Lauwers. Several members of the Schauspielhaus company appear in this play alongside the Needcompany actor Gonzalo Cunill.

An international tour of Ein Sturm is planned, naturally including Belgium.

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