Emilia Galotti

Hülsmann, Ingo

Hoss, Nina

Lehmann, Sven

Klein, Katrin

Pagel, Peter

Vogt, Henning

Zimmermann, Regine

Author: Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim

Composer: Wrede, Bert

Set Designer: Altmann, Olaf

Costume Designer: Altmann, Olaf

Stage Director: Thalheimer, Michael

---

Catalogue Number: THE10112

UPC: 4280000101129

---

It is only a few hours that Lessing scrutinizes in his tragedy. But they are enough to destroy the life of the decent middle-class girl Emilia Galotti. She, too, is a victim of her time, a victim of aristocratic arbitrariness, who does not care about the feelings and sensitivities of the individual, unless he is a member of the nobility. He takes what he wants, regardless of losses.

Michael Thalheimer cuts off Lessing's wordy, courtly-bourgeois robber's pistol from the classic beard, while he turns on the time screw. However, he does not resort to flat methods of updating. His protagonists are count, schemer or bourgeois girl in old garb, but they talk like coke. Almost expressionless, they chatter their lyrics around their ears and leave no doubt that here the single word is rarely placed on the gold scale. They are dialogues that are more like a firefight than a rhetorically-psychologically balanced stage conversation.

Why does he do that, this star director of the new century, who together with his set designer Olaf Altmann, with this production, delivered the first climax of a sustained series of celebrated productions? It is not only the lightness that carries us beyond the boundaries of a city theatre-usual classic interpretation on this theatre evening. It is the almost choreographic overall design of the stage action that captivates the viewer. Thalheimer plays with his figures seconds chess. He designs an artificial mechanism of entry and exit, of speech and counter-speech, of driving music and silence, which combine to form a fateful system in which the individual has no chance. He takes his Emilia and all those who play their good or bad game around them,