Heroes' Square - Burgtheater Vienna

"The empty promises of progress were nothing but spit in the face of the martyrs of all generations. If time is merely a form of perception or a category of reason, then the past is as present as today. Cain continues to murder Abel. Nebuchadnezzar still slaughters the sons of Zedekiah and blinds Zedekiah. The pogrom in Kishinev never ends. Jews are continually burned in Auschwitz. Those who do not have the courage to end their existence have only one way out: to kill their consciousness, to paralyze their memory, to extinguish the last trace of hope." (Isaac B. Singer)

Frank Castorf stages Thomas Bernhard's last play HELDENPLATZ about a Jewish professor family returning from exile and the traumas of history not as a now-convenient denunciation of Austria, but as a text of historical depth on themes that have remained of strong virulence, here and elsewhere: anti-Semitism, expulsion, flight, exile – and historical amnesia. The horizon is stretched far beyond the Heldenplatz in the heart of Vienna.

Direction | Frank Castorf
Set Design | Aleksandar Denić
Costumes | Adriana Braga Peretzki
Music | William Minke
Video Design | Andreas Deinert
Lighting Design | Lothar Baumgarte
Dramaturgy | Sebastian Huber
Artistic Collaboration/Script | Sebastian Klink
With Marcel Heuperman, Inge Maux, Birgit Minichmayr, Franz Pätzold, Branko Samarovski, Marie-Luise Stockinger
Live Camera | Andreas Deinert, Andrea Gabriel
Live Video Cutter | Georg Vogler
Sound Engineer | Adam El-Hamalawi, Kilian Mayer