Leonce and Lena at Theater Basel

Georg Büchner’s «Leonce and Lena» appears to start as a classic comedy of mistaken identity but ends as a strangely unredeemed dream play about the meaning and meaninglessness of existence, doubting reality and the desire to turn into a machine. It is an untethered flight into nothingness, filled with sadness and double meanings, in which every sentence can mean something other than what it appears to mean at first glance.

«Ladies and gentlemen, here you see two people of both sexes, a man and a woman, a gentleman and a lady. No more than art and mechanics, no more than pasteboard and mainsprings. Each one has a tiny, tiny ruby switch under the nail of the little toe of their left foot, one only has to press it gently and the mechanism will run for fifty years. The workings of these persons are so complete that they would be indistinguishable from other people if one did not know that they are merely pasteboard; one could actually make them members of human society. Watch closely, ladies and gentlemen, they have now reached an interesting stage, the mechanism of love is starting to express itself…» Georg Büchner

The play was written in 1836 in parallel with «Woyzeck», as an entry for a prize competition run by Cotta booksellers. Because Büchner missed the deadline it was returned to him unread and the world premiere did not take place until almost sixty years later, 58 years after his death.

Resident director Thom Luz takes Büchner’s other worldly and decayed final scene as the starting point for a new work of music theatre and follows his own course through Büchner’s forlorn but cheery world. Since 2015 Luz has premiered «LSD – mein Sorgenkind», «Inferno» and the scenic installation «Paradiso» at Theater Basel. His work was awarded invitations to the Berlin Theatertreffen in both 2015 and 2017.

Authors

• George Buchner
• John MacKay (i)
• Noble Shropshire