»The play of the hour« is how its director, the Ruhrtriennale’s Artistic Director Barbara Frey, describes Shakespeare’s brilliant and profound masterpiece A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which has been enchanting and baffling audiences for over 400 years. This poetic force of nature defies every category of genre. The text shifts in shape, meandering through a range of forms from court drama to broad farce, from a dream play to a philosophical treatise, from comedy to tragedy. Nothing here retains its original appearance. This is deeply unsettling. We are confronted with the shock of unpredictability. We watch as the characters lose control and experience it ourselves, recognising the brutality of unreliable emotions. We see how love fades and turns into contempt and conversely how ignorance gives way to sudden outbursts of passion, we get lost along with the young lovers chasing each other through the forest at night, that restricts our vision and blurs clear distinctions such as that between madness and reality. We are presented with the question of whether our waking or dreaming state is more powerful, or indeed whether we can even distinguish between the two, and who, why and to what purpose we are introduced to the dreams that we aspire to or that haunt us. Do humans, do we have a will of our own – or are we being controlled – by what, or by whom?

Together with the Burgtheater Vienna’s resident ensemble, Barbara Frey will not only unleash the famous dramatic potential of this brilliant text, but also ask whether the distant past might have something important to tell us about our current crisis-ridden present – might the Renaissance not only be the cradle of our identity, but also the origin of the paradox that we have lived in and with ever since?

Co-produced by Burgtheater Vienna and Ruhrtriennale.