Reise ans Ende der Nacht (Journey to the end of the night)

With its furious nihilism and raggedly aggressive language, Céline’s novel is a shock. Castorf’s production takes on these shock effects, it is the antithesis to inflationary stage adaptations of novels which confuse literature with its plots. He deals with the novel just as Céline deals with reality – through associations. The production’s flickering images, the stylistic device of overheating hysteria, Castorf’s lack of interest in any kind of orderly economy of narration – in Aleksandar Denić’s set design of corners and angles, all this translates Céline’s narrative style into theatre. Céline’s sentence “One surrenders oneself to noise as much as to war” seems to catapult Ferdinand Bardamu, played clearly and precisely, yet with overheated expressiveness by Bibiana Beglau and Franz Pätzold, through the hells of the early 20th century, through a world war, the crimes of colonialism in Africa and the brutalizing capitalism of the factory. This production constitutes the discovery of an only superficially amoral novel of the century as a text for the theatre.

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