ARCHIVES 2012 / Die Ringe des Saturn

Katie Mitchell makes no secret of her profound admiration for W.G. Sebald. For some years she has been thinking about taking this “lonely walker, explorer of melancholy, ghost-hunter” and putting his words on stage. More exactly, the text of The Rings of Saturn, in which the author chronicles his walking tours through Suffolk, on the East coast of England, a landscape marked by the ravages which man inflicts on himself and on the surrounding nature. Starting with this prose narrative of a journey, which is as much an autobiographical novel as it is a philosophical tale, Katie Mitchell sets out to follow in the footsteps of this insatiably curious rambler. It's not a question of using sophisticated technological resources to illustrate this first-person journey but rather of wandering around inside the narrator's mind; showing us the thoughts provoked in Sebald by the landscape, the images it inspires and the memories it evokes. Alongside him, we're forced to plunge into history, to visit eighteenth century China, return to Germany in 1945, watch Anglo-Dutch naval battles and, above all, to listen to the sound of footsteps and the sometimes laboured breathing of someone following his path, crossing epochs and continents, no matter what. The path of a civilised being who worries for the future of a world in a state of galloping erosion. JFP

W.G. Sebald (1944-2001) was the son of an officer in the Wehrmacht who fled the oppressive silence of post-war West-Germany to settle in England in 1966. He embarked on a brilliant academic career as a professor of German literature before devoting himself to his own multifarious writings. Marked by melancholy and haunted by the idea of destruction, his books Vertigo (1990), The Emigrants (1992), The Rings of Saturn (1995) and Austerlitz (2001) achieved great success. He was considered one of the greatest German-language writers in Europe.