The Schaubühne’s FIND Festival brings emerging theatre makers from around the world to Berlin.
The annual Festival of International New Drama presents 14 plays over 11 days, all with English surtitles – a boon to us, because we can see what’s hot in Bogota without maxing out any credit cards. One play, Angélica Liddell’s The Dead Dog at the Dry Cleaners, will join the Schaubühne rep, so no rush on that one. Fans of Italian long-timer Romeo Castellucci can catch his latest, Democracy in America. But here’s our own highlight reel.
We’re serious about the Bogota thing: Swiss-Colombian boundary-smashers Mapa Teatro bring The Unaccounted. The triptych is a surrealistic, colorful reflection on violence in 20th-century Colombia, theatre and ritual, and the possibility of revolution.
For those not totally burned out on tales from Trumplandia, Richard Nelson’s The Gabriels: Election Year in the Life of One Family is pretty self-explanatory. Kitchen-sink American realism set in real time, meaning the play set on election night premiered in New York on election night: Nelson was making changes until the last minute. We’re not quite ready to return to this particular slice of life, but the approach is interesting.
Irish group Dead Centre went on to sweep UK prizes after bringing two shows to FIND last year. Their latest, Hamnet, has less to do with this year’s “tragedy and democracy” theme than other shows – it’s about intergenerational conflict and based on Hamlet – but if their previous work is any indication, the sheer theatricality of the work will make up for its political mildness.
FIND Festival, Mar 30-Apr 9 | Full programme at schaubuehne.de
