Dimitrij Schaad (Karl Roßmann), photo by Thomas Aurin/Schauspielhaus Bochum
Jan Klata, the extremely talented enfant terrible of the Polish theatre, has been invited to stage Franz Kafka's "America" as a part of the Schauspielhaus Bochum theatre's special foreign directors series.
The play premiered on the 28th of April, and has had four subsequent showings. When Anselm Weber became director of the Schauspielhaus Bochum theatre last summer, he began inviting foreign directors to stage performances based on German texts. So far Paul Koek from Denmark, Mahir Günsiraly from Turkey and Fadhel Jaibi from Tunisia have been invited to shed new perspectives on well-known masterpieces of German literature.
Seduced by a servant girl at his parents' home, sixteen-year-old Karl Rossmann fathers a child. Wishing to avoid a scandal, his parents send him to America. Unfortunately, it happens to be everything but a land of promise for him. As the literary critic Tadeusz Nyczek puts it, "the adventures he experiences are full of absurd cruelty, equal to those of Don Quixote and Candide combined". When finally the protagonist seems to have found a hint of happiness at a place called the Oklahoma Theatre, Kafka abandons his novel. In the same year 1914, he begins working on "The Trial". Along with "The Trial" and "The Castle", "America", is also known under the title "The Man Who Disappeared" - as a part of the Kafkian "trilogy of loneliness". None of the novels has ever been finished.
The director Jan Klata was born in 1973. He studied at the Faculty of Theatre Direction at The Aleksander Zelwerowicz State Drama School of Warsaw and at The Ludwik Solski State Drama School of Krakow. He was an assistant to the three of the greatest Polish theatre directors: Jerzy Grzegorzewski, Jerzy Jarocki and Krystian Lupa. The first performance he directed was Nikolai Gogol's "Revisor", which premiered in 2003 at Jerzy Szaniawski Dramatic Theatre of Wałbrzych.
"Revisor" was one of the most significant debuts of the recent years. Since then Klata has been directing plays at the best theatres in Poland, including those in Warsaw, Kraków, Łódź and Wrocław. He participated in numerous foreign theatre festivals such as HAU-Theater Berlin, the Theatre Biennale of Wiesbaden, Festival d’Automne of Paris and the International Buenos Aires Festival (FIBA). Since 2006, Jan Klata has also been directing abroad, in Germany and Austria. He has won numerous prizes: Wrocław Theatre prize, Konrad's Laurel at the Confrontations Theatre Festival of Katowice, Grand Prix at the Opole Theatre Confrontations, the Konrad Swinarski prize for theatre direction awarded by the Teatr monthly, as well as the prestigious Passport award given by the Polityka weekly.
Franz Kafka's "America"
direction: Jan Klata,
stage design: Justyna Łagowska,
costumes: Mirek Kaczmarek,
choreography: Maćko Prusak,
dramatist: Olaf Kröck.
Cast: Maja Beckmann, Manfred Böll, Matthias Eberle, Andreas Grothgar, Ronny Mirsch, Kristina-Maria Peters, Bernd Rademacher , Roland Riebeling, Dimitrij Schaad, Daniel Stock, Werner Strenger.
Produced in collaboration with the Polish Institute of Düsseldorf.
For more information, see: schauspielhausbochum.de, www.polnisches-institut.de
Date: 18th of June, 26th of June, 2011
Venue: Schauspielhaus, Bochum
Organised by: Schauspielhaus Bochum, Polish Institute of Düsseldorf
Source: Polish Institute of Dusseldorf