If you read the program for this evening, you can feel the dramaturge's enthusiasm. His desire to present the audience with a play that they most likely don't know anymore. Alexander Leiffheidt is the name of the studied philosopher and literary scholar who lived and worked in Austria and Great Britain before he switched to the German theater system in 2010 and came to Frankfurt via Marburg and Bochum. In his “Notes on the Piece” he presents unpretentious thoughts on the reception and meaning of Witold Gombrowicz's “Yvonne, the Burgundy Princess”. He writes vividly about the "charming eroticism of the void" hidden in the grotesque from 1938, reflects on the lines of development of the characters and honestly admits how difficult it is to stage this exaggerated,material distorted by absurdity and senselessness: "If the game tilts on one side, it becomes a dead machine ballet, on the other, a banal family drama or a Shakespeare parody."

Simon Strauss

Editor in the features section.

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While one is usually used to the usually quickly leafed through program booklets that they chew the buzzwords of the time, dutifully recite the favorite vocabulary of the current discourse makers and otherwise limit themselves to a brief description of the content of the play and the author's biography, Leiffheidt takes the genre of program announcements seriously and leads with him a few but informative short texts comprehensively in the piece. He also quotes, but not the theoretical trivia that is currently in circulation, but rather what emerges from the reception history of the piece, which was once widely played. Not only does the Marburg literary scholar Jürgen Joachimsthaler, who died young, have an appearance, but also the great poetry and text representative François Bondy,whose son Luc brought his own opera version of "Yvonne" to the stage in Paris in 2009.

An idiocy turned explosive

After reading the program, the expectations are high.

As big as the words and interpretations that one encounters on the way into the auditorium sound: “an alienated mirror”, “a waste product of the emergence of modernity”, “an idiocy turned into an explosive” - this is all this piece is supposed to be .

What you get to see on stage then corresponds in many ways to what you hold in your hands in print: You can experience the rare case of a production that follows its dramaturgy with confidence.

Set designer Raimund Orfeo Voigt, for example, took the void at its word and placed a variable turntable in the wide Frankfurt stage, above which an indirectly lit cube hovers, which rises and falls depending on the mood of the protagonists.