Schaubuehne am Lehniner Platz. ‘’SHAKESPEARE’S LAST PLAY”. Von Dead Centre nach »Der Sturm« von William Shakespeare. Regie: Bush Moukarzel und Ben Kidd, Buehne: Chloe Lamford, Kostueme: Nina Wetzel, Video: Jose Miguel Jimenez Gonzalez, Musik: Kevin Gleeson. Mit: Thomas Bading, Moritz Gottwald, enny Koenig, Nina Kunzendorf, Mark Waschke. Premiere am 24. April 2018. (A. J. Goldmann’s article appeared in The New York Times, 11/2; via Pam Green.) MUNICH — As befits the world’s most famous playwright, William Shakespeare has had his work translated into over 100 languages, including Klingon. But long before he was the international superstar we know today, he was adored by the Germans with a fervor that led August Wilhelm Schlegel, the poet and critic who masterfully translated his complete works in the early 19th century, to claim him as “ganz unser” — “entirely ours.”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, this country’s most revered writer, compared his experience of discovering Shakespeare at age 22 to “a blind man given the gift of sight by some miraculous healing touch.” Roughly a century later, in 1864, the world’s first Shakespeare Society was founded in the city of Weimar. It survived the Cold War divide and is still going strong, with roughly 2,000 members. In 2010, Shakespeare’s Globe in London held a season of events to acknowledge Germany’s special relationship with the playwright. (He is performed more frequently here than in his native land, the theater said.)
So far this season, the highest-profile Shakespeare production here has been a new “King Lear” that reopened the Deutsches Schauspielhaus in Hamburg in October, after the theater underwent a major renovation.
