Between Dante Alighieri and Britney Spears

He says:

A lot of whining about the Schauspielhaus lately. Or the Zchauspielhaus, as they wrote themselves and as I have since childishly consistently pronounced the name. A loss of audience is lamented and the blame is quickly assigned: It must be due to the woken orientation of the new artistic direction. I wouldn't want to pay admission for political lectures either. My experience so far, however, has been quite different: Wokeness or not, I have seen more great productions at the Zchauspielhaus since the new directorship than I have in years.

One of them is "The New Life." Christopher Rüping staged a text by Dante Alighieri written in 1293. For those who don't know him: Dante is something like the Goethe of Italy. His opus magnum is a tough ham, with which today's high school students are plagued ("Faust" or "Divina Commedia") and his youthful work is about the fact that he flirted with a woman ("The Sorrows of Young Werther" or the staged "Vita Nova"). Whereby Dante, strictly speaking, did not even make it as far as the rebuff.

The story in "The New Life" is as simple as it is fascinating: Dante is so much in love with a woman that he never manages to approach her, for years. And then she dies. Although I knew this from the program from the beginning, I was still shaken to the core at that moment. This is great theater. And a great text. At some points, I would have liked them to savor this wonderful text more, to play it more. But overall the play is really worth seeing and guess what: There's a revival in February. Don't miss it!
 

She says:

I could give many reasons why this evening is worth attending, but at this point I will limit myself to one: the piano. It stands inconspicuously on a no-frills stage, almost as if someone forgot to put it away. Soon, however, its raison d'être is revealed: It plays by itself. I, at least, have never seen a piano on a stage as a real partner, adversary or interlocutor. Maybe if a pianist would take a seat at it, but this way you almost believe to be in an animation movie and wouldn't be surprised if the black wooden box suddenly started to talk. The piano's task is to accompany the stage action, sometimes sensitively, sometimes cheerfully. Together with the actors, it interprets Dante's love poems as excitingly arranged pop songs by Britney Spears, Natasha Bedingfield or Meat Loaf and thus tells us: The form may have changed in the last 729 years, but the longings have remained the same.
 

The new life - "where do we go from here?

Schauspielhaus Zürich
Freely adapted from Dante Alighieri, Meat Loaf & Britney Spears
Based on a translation by Thomas Vormbaum
Production: Christopher Rüping
A guest performance of the Schauspielhaus Bochum

Further performances in February and March 2023

translated with DeepL