Following Heinrich V. by William Shakespeare
What motivates a ruler to force people to hate, soldiers into battle and a people to fight? Is it within our power to end a war and bring about peace? By what means of manipulation, rhetoric and demagogy does a war become a tool of politics - and what price does the civilian population pay in any case, regardless of which side it feels it belongs to?
War.Powers.Peace(?) is a collaboration between the Globe Ensemble Berlin and the Urban Theater, an Eastern European ensemble whose members, who come from Ukraine or Russia, have had to experience flight and expulsion. Shakespeare's “Henry V” dramatically depicts how the protagonist, under pressure from domestic politics, persuades his advisors, the army and ultimately an entire nation to participate in a war.
Shakespeare's trick of structuring the dramatic events and acts of war, which take place before the audience's eyes in real time, with caesuras through the chorus enables the integration of text fragments from Niccolò Machiavelli and Hannah Arendt.
With Oleksandr Kryvosheiev, Andrii Vanieie, Illia Rudakov, Ilya Khodyrev, Nikita Petrosian, Olha Kryvosheieva, Henning Bormann, Tim Otto Göbel, Anselm Lipgens, Michael Schröder, Saskia von Winterfeld
Director: Natalia Lapina, set design: Arina Slobodianik, dramaturgy: Dr. Natalia Skorokhod, production management: Dr. Witalij Schmidt, artistic director: Christian Leonard.
In a new version by the translators' collective ConTra Wiebke Acton, Yvonne Jäckel & Christian Leonard
