Berliner Ensemble (DE)
The Tin Drum
Based on the eponymous novel by Günter Grass
Schedule
Original title Die Blechtrommel
Opening night September 30th 2017, Berliner Ensemble (Grosses Haus)
Running time 1 hour 50 minutes. No intermission.
Director Oliver Reese
Set designer Daniel Wollenzin
Costume designer Laura Krack
Composer Jörg Gollasch
Lighting designer Steffen Heinke
Dramaturg Sibylle Baschung
Cast
Oskar Matzerath Nico Holonics
Barely born, Oskar Matzerath recognizes the world as a universal disaster and rejects it. Only the metal drum promised by his mother opens an acceptable perspective of survival to him: the grotesque existence as a drummer, an artist with ambivalent motivations and effects. On his third birthday, Oskar decides to stop growing, but rather to watch and play the drum. He describes the development of fascist thoughts and actions from a worm’s eye view, reporting from adultery and the pogrom night, linking a personal story with history. Oskar becomes an observer and at the same time a participant in a world, where a collapse of the civilization like the Holocaust is possible. For all time of his life, Nobel Prize winner Günther Grass has felt not guilty but responsible for the crimes that have been committed in the name of the German people. The Tin Drum is also an attempt to make the mechanisms of the own seduction transparent. Despite all controversies around the novel and the author, this text stands for a milestone in the German post-war literature. Director Oliver Reese has adapted the original version by telling the story of the eternal drummer from the perspective of the main character played in a solo by the actor Nico Holonics.
