'The Stone' - a play in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Federal Republic of Germany (UK)
Three families; three generations; one house; one stone. To mark the anniversary of the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1949, Marius von Mayenburg’s latest play, The Stone, currently on show at the Royal Court Theatre, explores sixty years of German history through the story of the changing ownership of a house in Dresden. The play retraces the lives of three different families over three generations, from 1935 to 1993, providing glimpses of key episodes of German history, including the Nazi accession to power, wartime Germany, the aftermath of the German defeat and the division of Germany, and the fall of the Soviet bloc and subsequent German reunification.
The staging is minimalist and the play is performed by just six actors, who age or go back in time, to play their characters at different times in their lives and through the different eras of German history. The scenery does not change from one period to another, nor do the characters’ costumes or make-up, leaving the audience captivated in a desperate attempt to situate the play in time. More than a device for creating suspense, the unchanging scenery is also symbolic of Germany’s enduring past and the reverberations of Germany’s wartime and postwar history to the present day. The characters are unable to escape their pasts and they are also unable to escape from one another; their different stories are all interlinked by a common national history and by their successive ownership of the same house...
Read entire article at History Today
The staging is minimalist and the play is performed by just six actors, who age or go back in time, to play their characters at different times in their lives and through the different eras of German history. The scenery does not change from one period to another, nor do the characters’ costumes or make-up, leaving the audience captivated in a desperate attempt to situate the play in time. More than a device for creating suspense, the unchanging scenery is also symbolic of Germany’s enduring past and the reverberations of Germany’s wartime and postwar history to the present day. The characters are unable to escape their pasts and they are also unable to escape from one another; their different stories are all interlinked by a common national history and by their successive ownership of the same house...