Leonce and Lena
[Leonce und Lena]
Comedy by Georg Büchner
Premiered on May 1, 2003 at the Berliner Ensemble, Berlin, Germany
Performed in German.
“The Texan [Robert] Wilson and the Westphalian [Herbert] Grönemeyer brought the 167-year-old comedy ‘Leonce and Lena’ to the stage of the Theater am Schiffbauerdamm, the time-honoured theatre in the center of Berlin which Bertolt Brecht transformed into his Berliner Ensemble in the early 1950s. And where is Georg? And what about Büchner? With Leonce and with Lena, Valerio, Rosetta and all the others in the wistfully audacious, highly philosophical, joking, profoundly human fairy-tale spectacle about the forlornness and love of a prince from the realm of Popo and a princess from the realm of Pipi? They all hold hands tenderly (or maliciously) together with Herbert and Bob, and play beautiful games of ring-a-ring-o’roses - sometimes freaking out, sometimes desperately sad, sometimes intimately. Who would have thought that Georg Büchner, that wonderfully sharp-tongued raisonneur on human impossibilities, could be so simple?”