The Puppeteer

The life story of a celebrated puppeteer who survived a concentration camp, refuses to believe that the war and the nightmare are over, and recreates in his hiding place, with the help of his puppets, the world he lived in and that has stayed alive in his memory. "The production celebrates human creativity, which becomes the one necessary means in the struggle to survive. Holed up in an apartment in post-war Berlin, in the company of his marionettes, Finkelbaum, the former puppeteer from Lodz, means to give a masterly farewell performance. By some magic, the members of his company, long dead, reappear at rehearsals of his once-famous puppet theatre. And so a whole world comes back to life, one in which you find all those human feelings and qualities that no concentration camp ever managed to exterminate: love, courage, honour and, above all, the joy of creation. I set out to combine music and choreography with marionette theatre. The text is performed in Romanian, Russian, Polish, English, Yiddish and German." (Alexander Hausvater)