Dantons Tod reloaded

FREEDOM EQUALITY SISTERHOOD

Hamburg’s Thalia Theater and the Iranian star director with a paraphrase of the Büchner classic

Paris 1789: The French people go to the barricades, the king is overthrown. A few years later, the rev- olution eats its children. In 1835, Georg Büchner, a politically persecuted man, turns it into a play about Germany. At the center are two men with different views on how things should continue after the up- heaval. «The revolution must stop and the republic must begin,” Büchner’s bon vivant Danton pleads. His opponent, the fanatic Robespierre, wants to establish a «virtuous state” with the help of the guillotine - and will himself become its victim.

In 2023, Iranian director Amir Reza Koohestani and his co-writer Mahin Sadri offer an alternative story. They shift the focus to women. Wives and lovers to- day no longer sacrifice themselves, but choose to live  and fight for themselves. In the process, they ask old questions anew: What is freedom? What is justice? And who defines the boundaries? Since both live in Tehran, they relate their work to experiences of the current uprising in their home country.

«Danton’s Death Reloaded” is an interrogation of the French Revolution as the foundation of European democracy at a time when the central ideas of the Enlightenment are threatened in many ways. It is the third collaboration of the distinguished theater and film director Koohestani with the ensemble of the Thalia Theater Hamburg and, after the successful project «Transit” in 2021, the second co-production to premiere at the Kunstfest Weimar.