Kaspar

An inexperienced body, an unformed creature between a clown and a child, finds himself thrown into the world. His name: Kaspar, echoing the mysterious foundling Kaspar Hauser, who suddenly appeared in Nuremberg in 1828. He has no knowledge of civilisation, rules or language. The otherwise speechless Kaspar only tries out one sentence, repeating it stoically in a series of variations: “I want to become such as another once was.” And there they can be heard, the prompters. With voices of friendly authority, they name things and events, practice words and sentences with the amazed Kaspar and make sense of the world for him – encouraging assimilation, guiding his gaze, normalising his thinking. Peter Handke wrote his great dramatic poem as the 1968 movement was flaring up, at a time of protest against the post-fascist German Federal Republic and its conventions. It is a linguistic artwork of poetic beauty and explosive political content that he also called “verbal torture.” With grotesque humour and verbal acrobatics, director Claudia Bauer stages KASPAR as a musical power structure that dissects the cost of education and communication.