• Schumann,
  • 2017
  • 5 male - 4 female
Playwright: Sofia Kapsourou
  • Schumann draws its inspiration from the life of the great German composer, moving between two places and two eras: nineteenth-century Europe and twenty-first-century Athens. Through a highly distinctive language, often shaped in rhyming verse, the playwright brings together two seemingly incompatible historical and social realities, ultimately connecting them through an unexpected twist. Music has measure. Schumann’s words have measure. The Romantic hero goes beyond all measure. “We spoke in measured words of all that cannot be measured: Love. Madness. Talent.” The Romantic hero is no hero at all. At times cowardly, at times defenceless. At times comic, at times tragic. At times mad, at times a genius. Always in love. Always a poet. Always dangerous. The characters walk a tightrope across musical scales of language. They fall in love in verse, they part in verse, they die in verse. They are driven mad by the sound of A — the note to which all the mistakes of the world are tuned. And “just as mistakes love to happen again and again,” so the characters in Schumann persist in their desire to live, to succeed, to be loved. Will they make it?
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