ARCHIVES 2014 / La Famille Schroffenstein

Heinrich von Kleist is 24 when he publishes The Schroffenstein Family anonymously, a play set in the kingdom of Swabia towards the end of the Middle Ages, the violent story of a family divided into two branches who hate each other but whose respective heirs, Ottcar and Agnes, love each other. If the play is reminiscent of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, its byzantine plot sets it apart, especially when humour and perversity collide, when dreams become nightmares. At once lyrical, violent, and cruel, The Schroffenstein Family is a play in which fantasies only feed paranoia, a paranoia that can become extremely funny to the audience of this feud whose origins no one can remember. Giorgio Barberio Corsetti highlights the impossibility for the characters to understand and to reconnect with the truth of their own history. Mistakes lead to retaliation, misunderstandings to tragic errors, and Barberio Corsetti leads us, along with the characters, towards a tragic climax that will put an end to this war for lack of soldiers. Kleist's first play, The Family Schroffenstein is as crazy as it is exhilarating. The director of The Prince of Homburg offered it to the young students of ERAC so that they could bring their energy to this tragicomedy which they say brought tears of laughter to the eyes of the author himself.

Having worked as a director for the theatre, the opera, and the circus, Giorgio Barberio Corsetti likes to mix different elements in order to enhance what representations. Bodies, voices, texts, machines, videos all play a part in the creation of his ambitious shows, which he likes to present both in theatres and in situ. A lover of literary, dramatic, and philosophical works, he has given voice, since 1976 in Italy, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, or Singapore, to the texts of Thomas Mann, George Büchner, Shakespeare, Molière, Ovid, Dimitris Dimitriadis, Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, Vladimir Mayakovsky, or Chrétien de Troyes, with a certain partiality for Franz Kafka. It is as a tribute to him that he changed the name of his company to Fattore K. in 2001. He has accepted Olivier Py's proposition to open the 68th edition of the Festival d'Avignon with a production of The Prince of Homburg in the Cour d'honneur of the Palais des papes, once again defending what he considers the only thing that matters when it comes to the theatre: poetry.

The goal of ERAC is to train actors. Its teachers are artists, its teachings focused on performance. The students of the Ensemble 21 (class of 2014) are putting on The Schroffenstein Family under the direction of Giorgio Barberio Corsetti.

What a life Heinrich von Kleist had: born in 1777 and dead by suicide in 1811, he was by turns a soldier, a jurisconsult, a poet, a short story writer, a philosopher, a publicist, and a letter writer. A Romantic who didn't conform to the clichés of Romanticism, fascinated by Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also a restless traveller who crossed Europe from one end to the other, desperate and alone. He wrote nine very different plays between 1803—The Schroffenstein Family—and 1810—The Prince of Homburg. Today he is seen as the one who managed to marry, in a classical style, the real and subjectivity.

Jean-François Perrier, April 2014