The Maid of Orleans

At the age of 17, a young woman goes off with 4,000 men to fight in the »Hundred Years War«. Beforehand, saints had appeared to her and instructed to fight against the English. Joan of Arc succeeds with the troop she led in a few conquests before she was imprisoned in 1430; one year later she was publicly tried. The farmer's daughter is sentenced to death and burned alive at the stake as a witch.
In 1800, Friedrich Schiller began to adapt the material into a play. He meticulously sifts court records, corresponds with Goethe, who gives Schiller information on his drafts, and finally finishes DIE JUNGFRAU VON ORLEANS (THE MAID OF ORLEANS) in 1801 with the creation of a new genre of drama, the romantic tragedy. Schiller writes about the work, that one must not be bound by any general concept in this play, but dare to reinvent the form, and always keep oneself flexible in the concept of genre. He also changes the historical facts so that they work for the story of his Johanna.
Pınar Karabulut regularly stages at Schauspiel Köln and has already put Chekhov and Shakespeare, among others, into the present. Now, she is taking on the story of a woman who was first burned as a witch and later canonised, a story of two female clichés in one figure.