Frank Castorf, born in 1951, directed his first plays in the socialist Democratic Republic of Germany (GDR) and from the very start showed his critical mind that the reunification of Germany has not appeased. He has been director of the Volksbühne in the former East Berlin for eleven years and in all that time he has continued to embrace prose or plays into which he breathes a dose of inventive stagecraft, some of it voluntarily provocative, in order to avoid falling into the dull trap that is “theatre of consensus” and to preserve the dual function of theatre as thought-provoking and permanently rebellious.
Among the novels he has adapted are Dostoyovski's The Idiot, The Demons and Crime and Punishment as well as Bulgakov's The Master and Marguerite or Döblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz.
Accompanied by a faithful troupe of actors, by stage designers, plastic artists, video-artists and playwrights, he never balks at controversy while being very careful not fall prey to his own contradictions. He continually asks questions and forces the spectators to keep their eyes and minds open, but never gives political or moral lessons. His own background has made him aware that theatre described in black and white terms is sure to fail.
At the Avignon Festival, Frank Castorf presented Cocaïne en 2004.
A voyage into the hellish apocalypse of Nazi Germany in the throes of collapse, that's what Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894 - 1961) describes and depicts for us in Nord (North). He chose voluntary exile into that hell in 1944 - 45, fleeing Paris to escape certain death, aware that he would be submitted to violent punishment for his collaboration with the occupier and for his virulent anti-semitic writings.
Frank Castorf is interested in Céline's journey through this crushed landscape. He is interested in Doctor Destouches, who behind the writer, seems to carry out autopsies of the bodies of people who are more dead than alive, subjected to bombing raids lighting up the sky like fireworks, so close to death that is “the truth of this world.” It is a voyage through a sort of European Hodge-Podge across Germany in ruins towards Copen-hagen, via Berlin and Brandenburg in trains that never stop, amid people of all nationalities, displaced people with nowhere to go, speaking a mixture of languages, a sort of film negative of Europe as an anti-chamber in hell. For a director who likes to create a strong impact on stage, Nord, provides material with which to do theatre while presenting a challenge in how to convey a suspended, chaotic language, which dashes from one event to another, constantly fighting against academic structures, deconstructed but organised, and quite similar to Frank Castorf's directing style.
Céline as a commentator is just as much the actor as the director of his tale. He takes centre stage, a devilish provocateur, describing with ferocity the drama and the comedy which are inextricably mixed in those terrible days of \'survivance', imagining sometimes more than recounting, building a case for the defence, accumulating evidence of the suffering felt by this wild paranoiac. All that material serves Frank Castorf who is nourished by Céline, so that he can take us on this adventure, in this reflection on history, the only way, as he says, “not to insult the future.”
Distribution
adaptation et mise en scène :Frank Castorf
avec :Annekathrin Bürger, Marc Hosemann, Irina Kastrinidis, Young-Shin Kim, Michael Klobe, John Henry Nijenhuis, Milan Peschel, Lore Richter, Silvia Rieger, Lars Rudolph, Matthias Schweighöfer, Bernhard Schütz, Norbert Stöß (distribution en cours)
scénographie et costumes :Bert Neumann
collaboration dramaturgique :Dunja Arnaszus
lumières :Lothar Baumgarte
assistante à la mise en scène :Pamela Schlewinski
Nord est publié aux éditions Gallimard
Production
coproduction: Volksbühne am Rosa-Luxemburg-Platz (Berlin), Festival d'Avignon, Festival d'Athènes, Wiener Festwochen (Vienne)
avec le soutien de :la Fondation Deutsche Klassenlotterie
Ce spectacle est accueilli au Festival d'Avignon sous le haut patronage de :M. Klaus Wowereit, maire régnant de Berlin et Plénipotentiaire de la République fédérale d'Allemagne pour la Coopération culturelle avec la France