Montblanc & Salzburg Festival Young Directors Project
Miloš Lolić YDP I • Hinkemann
Tragedy in three acts by Ernst Toller
New production
Co-production with the Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus
In German with English surtitles
Duration approx. 1 hour 30 minutes.
PREMIERE
- 01 August 2014, 20:00
- 02 August 2014, 20:00
- 03 August 2014, 20:00
Print programme (PDF)
Miloš Lolić, Director
Sabine Kohlstedt, Sets
Jelena Miletić, Costumes
Nevena Glušica, Composition
Almut Wagner, Dramaturgy
Jonas Anders, Hinkemann
Katharina Schmidt, Grete Hinkemann, his wife
Irene Kugler, The old Mrs. Hinkemann
Daniel Christensen, Paul Großhahn
Rainer Galke, Max Knatsch
Markus Danzeisen, Sebaldus Singegott
Frank Seppeler, Michel Unbeschwert
Christian Ehrich, Stallholder
Jakob Ernst, Little boy
‘We’ve got so many cripples since the war.
What’s going to happen to them?’
Peace does not always mean that the war is over. Sometimes the fighting has only just begun.
In 1914 Ernst Toller was a 20 year-old student in France. When war broke out, he returned to Germany and enlisted in the army. He volunteered for the front and served at Verdun, where he was decorated for bravery before suffering a physical and mental breakdown. He was discharged, resumed his studies and joined the Independent Social Democratic Party. Following the overthrow of the Bavarian monarchy, the revolution of November 1918 and subsequent assassination of the Prime Minister, Toller became President of the Munich Socialist Republic for six days in April 1919. For this, he spent the next five years in prison. This is where he wrote Hinkemann.
At first sight Eugen Hinkemann is a fine figure of a man. Tall, well-built. A worker. Someone who has been prepared to fight for his country. However, he has been wounded, both physically and psychologically, in a particularly horrible and intimate manner. He has returned from the war with his manhood literally shot away.
The power of Toller’s play is that events which appear so clearly symbolic are located in such brutal and sensational times that they remain equally plausible as realism. The price of war was not paid equally, either between nations or between individuals. Just as on an international level the terms of the Armistice were the cause of much resentment in Germany and became a key factor in destabilizing the political climate in the years after 1919, Toller’s Hinkemann presents us with an individual whose sufferings are extreme even by the standards of this defeated society.
n this world of losers, populated by the poor and the depressed, each craving brief moments of gratification and capable of exploiting any opportunity to bolster their fragile self-esteem, Hinkemann is prepared to go to any means to support himself and his wife and to earn her respect. If he can’t achieve this, he thinks, what can he do?
Miloš Lolić studied directing for theatre and radio at Belgrade’s University of Dramatic Arts and won the BITEF prize for his production of Robert Musil’s The Enthusiasts. His production of God is a DJ by Falk Richter was presented at the Radikal Jung Festival in 2011. In 2012 he was awarded the Nestroy Prize for Best Newcomer for his production of Wolfgang Bauer’s Magic Afternoon at the Volkstheater Vienna.
David Tushingham