Lukas Bärfuss brings an ancient piece into the present: Theater as the world. What is your role?
For a hundred years, The Great Theater of the World (El Gran Teatro del Mundo) by Spanish playwright Calderón de la Barca has been staged in front of Einsiedeln Monastery. This play has no specific plot, place, or time; it's everywhere and nowhere. Instead of characters, it features allegories. Its message from nearly four hundred years ago still resonates today. The questions it poses are timeless: What role do you play? What are you willing to sacrifice for?
Lukas Bärfuss uncovers the utopian essence of the play. The apocalypse it portrays is not about destruction, but revelation. This book includes the original text of the Einsiedeln performance in dialect, a translation into standard German, and an essay by the author.
"Bärfuss possesses [...] a combative spirit, a trait only few poets have exhibited since Georg Büchner, perhaps only matched among Swiss writers by Max Frisch." Der Spiegel
"The radical self-examination, the shaking of comforting bourgeois certainties, characterizes all of Bärfuss' works." Die Welt
