“It's finally starting again.” At the opening of the 70th Bad Hersfeld Festival, Hesse's Prime Minister Volker Bouffier (CDU) spoke from the heart not only to the visitors, but also to all theater lovers.

Artistic director Joern Hinkel and the local politicians in Hersfeld took a high risk when they made the decision in spring not to cancel the festival.

With around 600 visitors per performance, placed in a checkerboard pattern, the festival can live to some extent.

In the anniversary year, the festival is offering three premieres in the monastery ruins, including a world premiere with the musical “Goethe!” And at least a European premiere with “The Club of Dead Poets”.

It is noticeable that Hinkel, who has meanwhile made his predecessor Dieter Wedel, who had failed under spectacular circumstances, no longer relies on Shakespeare, Schiller and other classics, but on stage adaptations of films.

Self-awareness and self-confidence

With the “Club of the Dead Poets” the director has found a subject that moved an audience of millions in the film version of Peter Weir.

Boys in a strict American boarding school learn to think freely and act independently thanks to the unconventional pedagogical methods of a charismatic teacher.

The Hersfeld set designers did not have to furnish the ruins of the monastery in any major way, because its architectural character resembles the conservative fortress in which Robin Williams, the teacher John Keating at the time, used ingenious tricks to instill self-knowledge and self-confidence in his frightened pupils.

Which actor of German provenance should compete with Williams, who started his world career with this film?

And how can you transplant a cinematic stroke of genius onto the stage?

Hinkel, who took over the directing himself in Hersfeld, hired Götz Schubert, an actor who did not copy the great Robin Williams, but found his own style.

With a gently ironic undertone, as a teacher, he displays an intellectual brilliance in his original human experiments, far from any arrogance, which is paired with empathy - but also with loving severity.

Schubert keeps the entire production, which is closely based on the film without staging antics, apparently in a very casual way.

The playful student actors can develop around him that it is a pleasure.

In some places, Hinkel lets them break out of the dreary boarding school reality into an imagined world of happiness.

“Carpe diem - seize the day” is the teacher's motto.

But not to have fun, but to discover yourself and your own talents.

While the other teachers want to breed their pupils to become synchronized performance robots, he relies on the ancient Greek demand: "Know yourself."

Guiding in the self-discovery process

The play opens the eyes to the fact that young people need charismatic guides in the self-discovery process - in this case a teacher made of flesh and blood in face-to-face lessons who, like Schubert, goes to the school desk or lies flat on the floor to demonstrate to the students that you can and should look at things from different perspectives.

“Carpe diem” also advises Wilhelm Jerusalem to his friend Goethe.

But he means something completely different from Teacher Keating, namely: Use every opportunity, especially in love matters.

In the musical “Goethe!”, Which author Gil Mehmert set up as director for the ruins of the monastery, the powerful-voiced Philipp Büttner as a court trainee in Wetzlar never misses an opportunity - until he meets Lotte, who is his passionate love.

Goethe in his poets' heaven will probably be amazed that Mehmert, the composer Martin Lingnau and the songwriter Frank Ramond made a rock opera out of his “Werther” two and a half centuries after its first publication with a present Büttner as Goethe and a very young Abla Alaoui who made the honest Lotte makes an emancipated woman and also sings beautifully.

It's wild and in places quite spectacular in this stage version of Philipp Stölzl's film “Goethe!”, Which, despite some sentimentalities and an occasional overdrive of the sound system, is still more fascinating than Andrew Lloyd Webber's dozen of musicals.

Goethe lovers will be amazed at how daring their idol was during his Sturm und Drang phase (possibly), while young people who are distant from literature and young people will notice that the Weimar classic was really not a bore in its youth.

Performances of both pieces until August 8th in the Bad Hersfeld monastery ruins.