Don Karlos: Family Affairs

DON CARLOS, one of Schiller’s most famous works, is a political thriller and family drama, both chamber play and world theatre, oscillating between soap and suspense, a House of Cards in verse. There are rumblings on the Spanish kingdom’s external borders and tensions are rife within it too. Don Carlos, the heir to the throne, loves Elisabeth, but she is now married to his father, King Philip. Carlos is loved by Princess Eboli, but the love is not requited and she swears revenge. When Carlos’s childhood friend, the Marquis of Posa, turns up and insists on his now famous ideal of freedom of thought, the court finally descends into turmoil. Seemingly irreconcilable differences between the generations and political systems emerge, pitting son against father, religion against reason, old against new; they look at each other helplessly and try to find a language for what they have in common and for rifts that cannot be bridged. Intrigues, disputes and corruption are rampant; love is there, too, as a driving force – how could it be otherwise? In the midst of all the confusion, Don Carlos, twenty-three years old and having done nothing for immortality, wonders where the kingdom and the whole damned world can go from here.

The director and playwright Felix Krakau has made a name for himself by reworking and writing sequels for classic texts. Without losing sight of the original, he transfers Schiller’s thoughts to the present day and, together with Carlos and Posa, tries to get an idea of what the society that is to come might be like. Who is failing to live up to which ideals, and do we need a social revolution? What does »freedom of thought«, invoked in the play, still mean today? In view of the developments and political escalations in the USA and the strong presence of right-wing extremists in the German Bundestag on the one hand and society’s powerlessness and inability to act on the other, it is worth storming the stage with the ideals and ideas of the Enlightenment.