Werther, Werther

FRI May 21 5:30 pm Konvikt / K3

J. W. Goethe – Ján Mikuš
WERTHER, WERTHER
Ján Mikuš / SK

original text J. W. Goethe – The Sorrows of Young Werther
script and director Ján Mikuš
performer Ján Mikuš


A dance and mime performance for one dancer was inspired by J. W. Goethe's epistolary novel Werther with the theme of a love triangle: Werther falls in love with Lotte who is engaged to his close friend, Albert. In his treatment of the story, the director Ján Mikuš emphasizes as the central idea the general nature of theatre and its capacity to communicate with the audience. Werther, left completely alone on the stage, is exposed only to acting and performing. Everything is going on in his imagination, dreams and will, and every single thing he enacts is addressed to his friend Wilhelm represented by the audience, or each individual spectator. Werther's insanity and inability of focus is rooted in an unrequited love, in the failure to posses one another. In the end, he becomes a mentally screwed clown with suicide left as his only refuge. The production also considers parasitic addiction, an urge to become the third point of a love triangle. And last but not least, the subject of artistic genius also comes in.
The production is an authorial project of Ján Mikuš, student of drama direction at JAMU Academy in Brno, Czech Republic. The piece wavers on the edge of pathos, melancholy, humour and cynics, attempting to bring forth an original perspective on theatre and new clownery, asking questions about whether a clown lives out anything at all while he produces his humour...
Ján Mikuš was awarded as Best Alternative Newcomer of the Year at Prague's 2009 “next wave” festival for his original treatment of Goethe's famed novel.


I neither want, nor am able to rehearse productions. I get a feeling of losing a piece of my life with each rehearsal, of divesting my character of a piece of his life. Why should I rehearse anything? I'd rather expose myself to authentic experience and stand up in front of the audience trying to remember the way I wanted to enact it. The concept lies in my head. Spectators are used to going to the theatre. They are adapted to teasing out real things, used to watching someone pretending that the play is not important. And it's not important, anyway. Theatre is ridiculous. That is why for me, circus is the model of theatre and clown is the essence of theatricality.



It is in Werther, Werther where we come across all shapes and sorts of clownery. The main and only clown, Werther, is happy, sad, sweet, disgusting, drunk with alcohol and love and, finally, set free by the living death. The limits of absurdity of human actions and self-destruction shift farther and farther, even failing to stop with the most essential human decision of all. Yet crossing to the other side isn't that easy.


Werther, Werther is a successful theatre jibe. Although the author has not come up with perceptibly new perspectives on the literary classic, he managed to present Werther in a way enclosed within the message of the original work while using fresh and non-traditional theatre methods.