Arendt - Premiere with Opening Night Celebration

ARENDT
THINKING IN DARK TIMES
By Rhea Leman, German translation by Henning Bochert

With Mayra Bosshard, Elias Popp, Hugo Ziegler
Directed by Tina Brüggemann
Set and Costumes by Ariane Scherpf
Dramaturgy by Tonio Kleinknecht

Copenhagen, 1975. Six months before her death, Hannah Arendt is to receive the Sonning Award. She travels from New York and, on the eve of the ceremony, sits down in her hotel room to write her acceptance speech. But what should she say to the prize committee, to the people of Europe? As if in a dream, the hotel room becomes the stage of her life - we encounter the political theorist at decisive moments: her expulsion from Germany, her arrest in France, her escape to the United States, and above all the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961. In conversation with her late husband, she wrestles with the right words and takes us on a surreal journey through memory - the escape rendered as a dark fairy tale, Eichmann on the toilet, her husband as a wry anchor. The result is a subtle psychological portrait that makes Arendt's painful clarity relevant to the present, confronting the horrors of the Nazi era through the fantastical and the absurd.

RHEA LEMAN premiered her play about one of the 20th century's sharpest and most provocative thinkers in August 2023 in Odense. The author grew up in New York City, studied in Boston, and moved to Copenhagen in 1981, where she established herself as a director and playwright. From 2003 to 2007 she served on the National Theatre Council; from 2009 to 2017 she was Artistic Director of DRAMAFRONTEN. Rhea Leman lives in Copenhagen.