Väter und Söhne (Fathers and Sons)

Daniela Löffner has succeeded in directing a clearly narrated and, in all its playful lightness, intelligent and sensitive production. Her treatment of Turgenev’s novel “Fathers and Sons” trusts the actors. With empathy, precision and not without humour, she shows us a group of people tangled up in their emotions, a group that we follow spellbound through the four hours of the show. Turgenev’s novel explores a generation conflict among the privileged classes. Students lounging in a pose of grand refusal and proudly announcing their own nihilism, while the servant serves their tea, are barely distinguishable from today’s Hipsters. Daniela Löffner’s directing, just like Turgenev’s writing, is not that of an ideologue, but that of a clear-sighted observer, blessed with a sense of humane mockery. So she chooses not to judge, but rather to let the conflict unfold casually, trusting in the highly contoured drawing of its characters. She accomplishes the feat of presenting Turgenev as a predecessor of Chekhov’s and to hold the balance between dry humour and unsentimental melancholy.

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