This year’s edition of the annual Taipei Arts Festival opens next week, with a line-up inspired by Italian author Italo Calvino and his book, Invisible Cities.
The first two plays in this year’s theater-centric festival are fittingly enough about waiting and absent people.
The Deutsches Theater Berlin’s production of Samuel Beckett’s acclaimed Waiting for Godot (Warten auf Godot) opens Friday next week at the Metropolitan Hall for three performances, while the Tainaner Ensemble’s (台南人劇團) coproduction with French playwright, poet, author and director Pascal Rambert, Ghosts (一家之魂), opens at the Wellspring Theater the same night, but for a 10-show run.
Photo: Courtesy of Arno Declair
The Deutsches Theater Berlin production was originally produced for the 2015 Berliner Theatertreffen, an annual two-week festival in the German capital, and was named as one of the 10 “most notable productions” in that festival even though it had been tinged with tragedy.
Bulgarian director Dimiter Gotscheff, who had been hired to helm the show, died during the preliminary work. The actors said their performances were an homage to him.
For those not familiar with Waiting for Godot, it is about two men, Vladimir and Estragon, who are waiting for a friend, Godot. They wait and wait. To pass the time, they talk, tell tales and sometimes dream. Occasionally a passerby appears. It is a show about existence, about nothing — and everthing.
Photo: Courtesy of the Tainaner Ensemble
Warten auf Godot runs 135 minutes without intermission. It will be performed in German with Chinese surtitles.
Ghosts, written and directed by Rambert, is about another kind of gathering, a family get-together, and the retelling of tales, only this time they are family memories.
Six siblings are preparing dinner together. Over the course of the four-act play, they will cook, eat, drink and talk — and try to put their family back together again, while the absence of relatives who are no longer with them hangs heavy over the proceedings.
It becomes a dialogue between the living about the living and the dead.
The 30-year-old Tainaner Ensemble has built a reputation for new productions by contemporary Taiwanese and foreign playwrights as well as restaging classics from the Chinese and Western theatrical canon. Ghosts is Rambert’s first time directing in Taiwan.
Ghosts runs 105 minutes with no intermission. It will performed in Mandarin, but there will be English-language subtitles on the opening night.
Additional information is available on the Taipei Arts Festival Web site (www.taipeifestival.org).
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