Steppenwolf

Harry Haller, a highly educated man who suffers from gout and is weary of the world, feels torn between his “two natures”: the profound thinker and scholar, who loves Mozart and Goethe, and the anarchistic, wild “wolf of the steppes”, driven by an irrepressible hunger for freedom. His life has lost all orderly structure. He has given up his job and spends his time reading, smoking and drinking, endlessly ranting against the bourgeois world, mediocrity and the complacency of the ordinary, even though he secretly yearns for the order and tidiness of an ordinary life.

Harry has just moved into his new abode, an attic room in a middle class apartment building, and he has decided that he will commit suicide by the time he turns 50. But then his life takes an unexpected and crucial turn: wandering through the city he discovers the mysterious “magic theatre”, which seems to be just the place for him, and meets androgynous Hermine, who shakes him out of his depressed torpor. She teaches him to dance and introduces him to Maria, who is very talented when it comes to love. And handsome jazz musician Pablo, who always has just the right drug at hand, induces Harry to take further steps towards discovering his true self…

Published in 1927, the novel “Steppenwolf” established Herman Hesse’s (1877–1962) global renown as an author. The text blends the unrest of the interwar years, the premonition of an upcoming war, a desperate hunger for life and the technologisation of the world exemplified in the rise of the radio and the automobile with a radical self-analysis – which is not without hope of salvation and of the overcoming of the self through art and laughter.

Johannes Ender, whose adaptation of “Werther” drew record audiences in the 2017/2018 season, again collaborates with stage and costume designer Hannah Landes to create adequate worlds for the rich imagery of the novel in the intimate spaces of the studio theatres Emailwerk Seekirchen and Salzburger Kammerspiele.

TICKETS

für die Vorstellungen am 14. und 15. September 2018 / Kulturhaus Emailwerk Seekirchen

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