WOLOKOLAMSKER CHAUSSEE - THE LIFE OF THE AUTOMOBILE | AT A GLANCE | THE PLAY | CAST AND CREDITS |
| Kamani, 6.30pm, Tue, 12 Jan German, 150 minutes Direction: Lars-Ole Walburg Playwrights: Heiner Müller/Ilja Ehrenburg  |
In 1978, Vaclav Havel wrote that it did not appear as if Western democracies had a solution that could offer any fundamental opposition to that automatism of technological civilization and industrial-consumer society. Twenty years after the fall of the Wall, director Lars-Ole Walburg confronts Müller’s play with Ilya Ehrenburg’s profound and uncannily contemporary biography of total success, The Life of the Automobile. The text, which was written between 1928 and 1935, depicts the spectacularly triumphant progress of a product and the panopticon of its unfettered producers from diverse perspectives such as the conveyor belt, rubber plantations, oil fields and the stock exchange. This triumph reflects the unsustainability of our present situation in an oppressive manner. Does history really go around in circles? Are we at the beginning once again? How do we proceed from here? | Sachiko Hara Henning Hartmann Camill Jammal Rainer Frank Daniel Nerlich Sandro Tajouri Set Designer: Robert Schweer |