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2009 June 20th

THE STORM
after William Shakespeare
in a version by Josepha Sophia Sem and Martina Veh

World premiere on 20 June 2009 with 30 further performances

Direction/Dramaturgy/Writing: Martina Veh
Set design: Barbara Schwarz
Composition: Elmar Raida
Sound Design: Ralf Funk

Object play: Zuza Erbyova
Actors: Marc Bernhard, Zuza Erbyova, Ralf Funk, Barbara Lackermeier, Georg Schießl, Josepha Sophia Sem, Jo Vollrath,
Musicians: Thomas Anleitner, Gerwin Eisenhauer, Ralf Funk, Martin Jungmayer

Duration: 120 minutes

Prospero:
"We are such stuff, as dreams are made on,
and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Prospero, once an important but unworldly businessman, has been driven out of Milan. With his daughter Miranda and his beloved books, from which he draws magic, he lives at an abandoned airport where he had made an emergency landing twelve years ago. There, he has been gladly forgotten. Not entirely unhappy about his involuntary fate as a "dropout", Prospero keeps the native Caliban as an employee and controls the air spirit Ariel thanks to his authority and magic power. This magic sparks a storm and forces two high-flyers to make an emergency landing: Antonio, Prospero's brother and scheming corporate successor, and his business partner Alonso, the boss of a much more powerful Neapolitan company, along with their fun-loving but decadent entourage. What follows is an elaborate plan by Prospero to negotiate the past and present fates of the survivors of the plane crash and the islanders.

The people in distress are at the mercy of Prospero's will. He shows them their own lives and also - in the case of his former colleagues - their guilt for his worldly disempowerment. Through storm and music, he also mixes up the past and present within the people, creating new insights, knowledge and relationships. Ultimately, he renounces the completion of his revenge in favour of reconciliation.
Prospero stages a storm to make not only ghosts but also his former rivals appear on his desolate transit site. For his servant Ariel, he invents the most wondrous manifestations and prescribes not only for the spirits, in detail, their tasks. He arranges meetings and romances. An experiment.

But Prospero, the dropout, is not entirely consistent. Ultimately, he wants to take back his ancestral place as manager in Milan, which his brother Antonio once robbed him of. But he also wants an audience, ultimately to deliver a good performance. His epilogue sums it up:
"Unless the wind of applause blows my sails,
all my efforts to please you have been in vain."

Prospero is a humanist who sometimes pulls the strings with inward-turned resentment, sometimes with an enigmatic smile. You have time now! You are stuck in the interstice of time!
The question is: Do the protagonists use this space given to them by a catastrophe to rethink their lives, their goals, their ideals, their dreams?
Alongside Prospero, Gonzalo, for example, explains his ideal of society:
"Wealth, poverty and services: abolished.
Contracts, inheritance, land ownership: none of that.
Nature would be strong enough to produce, in its own way, everything in abundance
to feed my innocent people."

The youths Ferdinand and Miranda, playthings of the powerful, are but puppets in the hands of Prospero the stager, and their own aspirations to life do not seem to have occurred to you at all.
A conflict-ridden path of self-discovery and the emergence of fragile hope. No age, no social class is left out. The characters dance wildly on the fine line between longing and responsibility, self-realisation and the functioning fabric of society.
A plot between departure and arrival, between being and becoming, between dream and reality, point of view and vanishing point.

A production of the District of Lower Bavaria / Cultural Department: Kulturmobil Niederbayern
Project organisation and management: Dr. Maximilian Seefelder
Tour organisation and public relations:
KulturBüro Maria Bruckbauer, Landshut