Cork World's Theatre

‘The Lee runs dark…the End Wind approaches’

The Swiss Ambassador, His Excellency Beat Loeliger, The Austrian Ambassador, His Excellency Walter Hagg and Deputy Lord Mayor of Cork, John Kelleher were present on Monday, November 29th, 2010 in UCC’s Aula Maxima to formally inaugurate a workshop production, running over three nights, of Cork’s World Theatre, a translation / adaptation of a powerful play by the leading Swiss novelist and dramatist, Thomas Hürlimann, that centres on our individual and collective responses to pressing economic and ecological challenges The production, directed by Peadar Donohoe and with music by Johnny McCarthy, is a collaboration between the Cork-based Cyclone Repertory Company and UCC as well as the Cork School of Music. The lead roles are played by professional actors from Cork and Dublin.

The translators and project coordinators are Dr Manfred Schewe and Stephen Boyd of the Departments of German and Hispanic Studies at UCC. The original play, Das Einsiedler Weltheater (The Einsiedeln World Theatre), proved to be THE theatre event of the year in Switzerland when it was performed in front of some 66,000 people over a three-month period in the summer of 2007.

Since 1924, at regular intervals of approximately 5 years, and always in the summer months, the community of the small Swiss pilgrimage town of Einsiedeln (in the canton of Schwyz) had been staging a German-language version of one of 17th-century Spain’s most famous religious plays: El gran teatro del mundo (The Great Theatre of the World) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. In this respect, the Einsiedeln tradition recalls those of Oberammergau in Bavaria and the annual Everyman production that forms part of the Salzburger Festspiele. Since a new performance fell due in Einsiedeln in 2000, the townspeople decided to remain faithful to the tradition by departing from it: they invited Thomas Hürlimann, a former pupil at the school run

by the monks of the ancient Benedictine abbey (whose towering Baroque façade traditionally served as backdrop for the performances), to reinterpret Calderón’s play for the new millennium. The experiment worked, and Hürlimann agreed to pen an even more radical adaptation for 2007.

In both of his re-writings, Hürlimann preserves Calderón’s traditional metaphors of the world as stage and life as play. The original seven central characters, representing fundamental human social roles and attributes also survive, albeit with some concessions to contemporary reality: The World, for example, remains The World, and Beauty, Beauty, but the King transmutes into a bombastic local politician, typifying the way in which in Hürlmann’s texts the world becomes Einsiedeln and vice-versa. In contrast to Calderón’s affirmation of traditional Catholic doctrine, Hürlimann’s play culminates in an overwhelming vision of ecological disaster and economic collapse heralded by the mysterious End Wind, whose appearance punctuates each of the play’s seven scenes. As the title suggests, it is a work which plays with conventional distinctions between the universal and the local, different local and national traditions and time periods, all features that allow it to be classified within the genre of ‘World Theatre’.

Working in collaboration with Hürlimann, Schewe and Boyd have added another link to the tradition by adapting his 2007 play specifically for performance in Cork, a city that is no stranger to ecological disaster in a country learning to live with economic collapse.

The project has received substantial funding from the Swiss Embassy, with generous support also coming from the German and Austrian Embassies, as well as from the College of Arts Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultures , and the Departments of German and Hispanic Studies at UCC.