MEFISTO FOR EVER

After the far right rose to power, a theatre company wondered what to do next. Some decided to leave, and others stayed. Kurt Köpler opts to lead the struggle from the inside. Beauty is the artist’s greatest weapon but how far can it be stretched? Where does strategy end and fatal commitment begin? Kurt Köpler is not a cynical upstart like Hendrik Höfgen, the star of Mann’s Mephisto. In Lanoye’s hands, he is much more complex, much more tragic: an actor (the quintessential “great actor”) who makes a pact with tyrants, convinced that it is for the greater Good. He naively thinks that he can keep his artistic freedom and “attack the system from the inside” and then when things start to go wrong, he believes that this is how he can save lives.

Lanoye’s work is set in Central Europe in 1936, during Hitler’s rise to power. A major public theatre sees a change in director as one decides to go into exile for political reasons and his place is taken by another, who is convinced he can face down the new regime using committed theatre.