THIS EUROPEAN CO-PRODUCTION GATHERS SIX ECCENTRICS ON AN ALPINE SUMMIT – POETIC, AT TIMES MELANCHOLIC, ALWAYS HUMOROUS, AND CARRIED BY VERY GOOD SONGS.
With DER GIPFEL (THE SUMMIT), Christoph Marthaler — Europe’s outstanding theater poet of the (non)sensical — returns to the Summer Festival. Now based in Hamburg, the Swiss director explores how communities live together in this new European production, by placing six idiosyncratic figures in a mountaintop hut. A retreat from reality? A summit? A symbol for Europe? Isolated and multilingual, the group waits, negotiates, and drifts through protocols and meanings – while breakfasting on Swiss Gipfeli. »I’ve always loved watching how groups form and organize, how everyone finds—or doesn’t find—their place,« says Marthaler. Blending linguistic confusion, musical gravity, and absurd humor, he captures the difficulty and urgency of making decisions together—for humanity, for political unions, and for theater itself. And he shows how great art can continually renew the idea of coexistence and disarm nationalism with beauty and wit.
