The second event in the 2024/2025 municipal theater program will be the play 'Mephisto' on Friday, 15 November 2024 at 8 pm in the Idar-Oberstein Municipal Theatre. The play with music based on the novel by Klaus Mann will be presented by the Neues Globe Theater Potsdam. The theater program is supported by Kreissparkasse Birkenfeld as the main sponsor.
Mephisto, written by Klaus Mann in exile in 1936, is regarded as a key novel about the actor Gustaf Gründgens. However, according to Mann, it is "not a portrait, but a symbolic type": an actor in conflict between career and conscience. The film adaptation starring Klaus-Maria Brandauer won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1981.
The (fictional) story focuses on actor Hendrik Höfgen, who has become a celebrated star of the so-called Third Reich and is appointed director of the Berlin State Theater. Höfgen, who comes to terms with the Nazi rulers late in life and openly seeks conflict with his Nazi colleague Hans Miklas in the ensemble, initially flees to Paris. However, Lotte Lindenthal, the wife of the "aviation general" and Minister President, herself a rather mediocre actress, wanted Höfgen as a partner for her Berlin debut at the Staatstheater and was able to persuade her husband, "the fat one", to bring Höfgen back to Berlin.
As a passionate actor who is tailor-made for the role of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust, the opportunist Höfgen only realizes far too late that he has actually made a pact with the devil. He will lose almost everyone who means anything to him in this free fall into the moral abyss: his lover Juliette, his wife Barbara, his communist friend Otto. Only the actress and soulmate Nicoletta, with whom he has entered into a marriage of convenience to escape persecution for his sexual orientation, will stand by him. In the end, Hendrik has become a "monkey of power", a "clown to distract the murderers". An actor torn between his career and his conscience. Culminating in the famous sentence: "I'm just an ordinary actor!"
The New Globe Theater brings 'Mephisto' to the stage as a "dance on the volcano" in the distorted mirror of a political cabaret of the 1920s/30s with live music and an emcee. The play was awarded the INTHEGA theater prize "Die Neuberin" 2024 - 2nd prize.
- Tickets are available in advance at www.ticket-regional.de and at the associated ticket agencies.