Romanticism: A performance based on Hermann Broch's "The Sleepwalkers"

A proponent of an impassioned and profoundly meditative theater, the young and rapidly up-and-coming director Themelis Glynatsis, one of the outstanding voices of the contemporary Greek theatre, takes on the first novel in Broch’s trilogy. Espousing a totally new directorial idiom far from the mimicry of the post-modern and of laboured abstraction, Glynatsis promises audiences a poetic production, a theatrical rite of initiation set to the hollow thud of a world collapsing—the world of 1888 which seems so disturbingly familiar to us today.

A proponent of an impassioned and profoundly meditative theater, the young and rapidly up-and-coming director Themelis Glynatsis, one of the outstanding voices of the contemporary Greek theater, takes on the first novel in Broch’s trilogy. Espousing a totally new directorial idiom far from the mimicry of the post-modern and of labored abstraction, Glynatsis promises audiences a poetic production, a theatrical rite of initiation set to the hollow thud of a world collapsing—the world of 1888 which seems so disturbingly familiar to us today.

A fine cast of veterans and relative newcomers bring to life the story of the young Joachim von Pasenow, who is forced into a career in the army by his family, where he espouses the absolutist and nationalist ideals of Prussian militarism, and sleepwalks through a world “ruled by a sort of emotional inertness” like some Faustian antihero…

Hermann Broch, “Die Schlafwandler. Eine Romantrilogie“ © Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt a. M. 1978