Lothar Kittstein

Die Bürgschaft
4 D, 4 H
UA: 23.05.2011 in Recklinghausen · Schauspiel Frankfurt in Koprod. mit den Ruhrfestspielen Recklinghausen · Directed by: Lily Sykes
Tyrants become gangsters, friends become a conservative married couple, and Friedrich Schiller’s ballad of honor, love, faithfulness, friendship, a ballad which touches the stone hearts of the powerful, transforms itself into a postmodern thriller.

When Schiller wrote The Pledge (Die Bürgschaft), hardly four years had passed since the French Revolution and the terror that ended it—an open wound. The great ideals could still be felt in the air, and it seemed as if Schiller sought with his impassioned canto to once again conjure up a wise, noble vision of humanity. This new adaptation of The Pledge tells the story of a middle-class couple, shaken to its core by the violence that suddenly breaks into their clean, small world. Old and new versions of The Pledge come into contact and blend together—but at the same time, the characters find themselves in a completely different dimension. Violence, destruction, the fundamental uncertainty of the Ich—Lothar Kittstein narrates the conflicts without a single utopian horizon in sight, as the endangerment of private existence. He concerns himself with how people act in extreme situations, what they are capable of when their life is suddenly in shambles. What do people do when they are thrown back into a sort of state of nature, and just how thick is the crust of civilization—and what happens when it finally collapses?