The State Theatre Augsburg continues its innovative stage programme: the novel Wittgenstein's Mistress has been integrated into the theatre as a hybrid performance.
German premiere in Augsburg: Wittgenstein's mistress as a hybrid play
The novel Wittgenstein's Mistress was published in 1988 by the US author David Markson. Among other things, through the stringing together of allusions and statements, the book makes stylistic borrowings from the Tractatus logico-philosophicus of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
In this stage version of the novel "Wittgenstein's Mistress", described as a "stroke of genius", performance and virtual reality elements combine to create a cleverly interwoven work of art.
That's what it's about
Kate is an artist and possibly the last person on earth. But did it really exist, that apocalypse that only spared Kate? Or is Kate simply insane? Not alone in the world, but just completely without references and relationships to it?
In a beach house on the US East Coast, Kate documents her "looking", as she calls it, for survivors of the nameless catastrophe on her travel typewriter and sifts through her memories of works of art and artefacts of a supposedly vanished civilisation. In the process, she jumps through time, mentally circles the globe again in the most diverse vehicles, spends the night in the world's largest museums, where she occasionally has to set fires to keep warm or add her own works to the collections.
Kate's memories spin off a crazy cultural history from Homer, who may have been a woman, to Herodotus, Spinoza, Rembrandt's rusty-brown cat or the life of Brahms - but again and again, hidden deep between the lines, a sadness flashes up that suggests Kate's story may be quite different.
Markson's novel "Wittgenstein's Mistress", widely described as a stroke of genius, is philosophical science fiction and an impressive study of human loneliness.
Source: Mixed / youtube
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