Anyone with an interest in Germany and its history should rush to get tickets for David Hare's reading on Berlin, at the National Theatre.
This hour-long meditation on the city is based on the author's experiences there over many years, most recently during the filming of The Reader (the new film with Kate Winslet, for which Hare wrote the screenplay).
Hare's monologue is incredibly broad ranging, touching on history, politics, theatre, film, architecture and food. He moans about the niceness of the people, and that Berlin today is all about lifestyle; that history and politics are forgotten there.
Not such a bad thing. I would rather live in Berlin today than in 1961 . . . or 1948 . . . or 1945 . . . or 1938 . . . or 1933 . . . or 1923 . . . or 1919 . . .
Berlin - A reading by David Hare, National Theatre, London. Directed by Stephen Daldry.
1 comment:
Yes why are these avant garde playwrights so down on simple bourgeois pleasures. I can see that Berlin during the later stages of the Weimar Republic might have been an exciting place for a few, but for most it was probably just scary with mass unemployment and street fights between the Nazis and Communists. Berlin was probably much the same in 1909 and one hundred years later in 2009.
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